How would you ride out a zombie attack?

Lets say for some reason, the dead began to rise from the grave as zombies, i’m talking the classic, slow moving Romero flesh-eaters, where would you hole up and defend yourself?

in this scenario, society is in chaos and in the process of collapsing, law enforcement is combatting the zombie scourge and isn’t worried about “looting”

me, first i’d pack up my firearms (Mossberg 500 12-gauge, Parker VH side-by-side 12 gauge, Taurus 669 .357 Magnum, and my Ruger Mark II .22 (i guess i’d use that one if i wanted to annoy the zombies :wink: ) and get in my car, even though my apartment only has a single door, it’s on the ground floor, and has 2 very large windows, if those were breached, i’d be screwed

depending on the amount of zombies around, i’d try to make it to the local gun shop in town and load up on ammo, some heavy caliber weapons, as well as some archery supplies (for backup)

once loaded up, i’d then head for work, the Small Dog Electronics warehouse, it’s a large, secure, metal building, yes there are 3 doors leading in, but they are heavy steel fire doors, and the 2 overhead doors are also a strong metal, impossible for zombies to breach, i’d open the overhead door, pull my car in, and lock the place down

once inside, i’d then set up my base of operations in Art’s office, it’s on the second floor, and seeing as zombies have problems with stairs, in the unlikely event they breach the doors, i could take them out from the upstairs level, in the evenings, i’d set the alarm system so any motion on the lower level of the warehouse would trigger the alarm, waking me up

once secured in the warehouse, i’d unpack the car and hit the local grocery store to stock up on food, specifically, canned goods and other food with a long shelf life, i’d also pick up a bunch of propane cylinders for the gas grill, after the food has been stored, i’d go out on searches for survivors, anyone who hasn’t been bitten would be given the opportunity to hole up in the warehouse, but only if they’re willing to help defend it, as well as go on rescue runs

as soon as it would be practical, i’d get a large 4WD vehicle and use that for rescue/restock trips, i figure if we could hold out for a few months, the zombies would eventually all “die out” and society could then be restored

how would you ride out a zombie attack?

Hide in the trunk of your car.

Funny you should mention this. I happen to live in Beverly, Massachusetts: The Zombie Capital of the Northeast™, so that makes me sort of an authority. More or less. Anyways…

I tried your approach, with the guns and the hoarding and the looting, and it just wasn’t for me. So, I figured Hey, if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em! Zombies aren’t so bad. They just have bad P.R. It’s a matter of spin, really. And the night life is great. Believe me when I tell you, you haven’t partied 'till you’ve partied with the Zombie crowd. The whole preoccupation with eating the flesh of the living has been blown way out of proportion by the media. I mean, seriously, you can’t base your entire perception of a subculture on one movie! I mean, really now. Those people are actors, by Jeebus! And what’s wrong with some fresh, tasty brains once in a while, anyhow? Nothing, I say! Brains are just meat, really, like a steak. Yes. Just like a steak. A nice… fresh… delicious… brain… brains

<Ahem!> So cut the Zombies some slack, for crying out loud, and share those tasty, delicious brains of yours. You’ll see. It’s not so bad.

Me for the open sea. Or lake, or large river.

Water is a great natural barrier, & I see no evidence these gomers can swim. So get a sailboat.

Come ashore to re-supply at a time & place of your choosing. Suppliment you diet with fish & kelp.

Small islands are your friends!

Eventually, bacteria, insects, feral dog packs, & carrion birds will solve all problems.

Hey, your name in real life wouldn’t be Reg Shoe, would it? :wink:

Nope. Sorry. Brains? Hmmm?

I haven’t thought it all the way through, but I’m certain a pump-action pistol-grip shotgun would be involved…Oh! and a bandana for my head!

And an A-Team style van with cobbled together armor.

(Sorry about the length!)
Well, the fantasy that got me through that first terrified night after seeing ‘Dawn of the Dead’ was that I was a genetically engineered experiment in a super secret lab! I could not handle the thought of the undead coming in my house while sleeping, so I had to change things to calm myself down. shiver

But, in the secret lab, on that fateful night of the undead scourge, they did what all bases do: lock down. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize the futility of this as several outside guards had come in with bite marks and gushing wounds. The screams started slowly during the night, alarms going on and then abruptly shutting off, shouts coming down the halls and a resonating pounding as if the lab itself was having it’s very own ‘extreme makeover.’ (bad, I know, very bad!) :smiley:


My body alert under my thin white gown, I stood perfectly still in the middle of my cell. It had been silent for at least an hour now, and with no ability to see outside, the screams had at least let me know that there were others…that the Doctors would not forget me. This silence was the worst of this horrible night, or day, or even days. With no windows or bars, my only access to the outside world was the narrow door standing upright before me. The door was a taunting shape, reinforced to withstand pressure from the inside, and impervious to my frantic struggles.

My ears caught a far away muffled scraping, steadily louder and louder, until a low hum could be heard. The sound of moaning, and…an odd, almost dragging sound began to distinguish itself from the hum. I realized that it was the sound of several bodies slowly moving along the narrow hallways. They arrived at my door and began pounding, rhythmically and eerily, and fear spread through my body in a wave. I was for one second separate from the small white clad girl standing as a statue in the middle of the room.

And then the wave rolled back through my body, causing my body hair to rise, as I heard that telltale sound of the access button being pushed. The first person to squeeze past the door was Doctor Brent, but unlike his usual half contented smirk, his face was empty, slack jawed and hungry. He came at me so quickly that instinct reacted, and I violently pushed him back into the ragged and bloody people crowding behind him. He came at me again and again, and soon I was fighting in earnest as more hands reached for me, pulled at me, tried to get to me past those blocking the door. I pulled what looked to be a security guard in front of me as a shield between the Doctor and me, still not understanding what had happened to these people.

The clammy arm in my hands twisted off so easily that I could only stare stupidly at the discolored flesh and protruding shoulder bone in my hands. Unfortunately, even without his other arm, the guard lunged again undeterred, his half ruined face holding the same slack desire. I managed to use his arm to keep some distance, while delivering a kick at the good Doctor’s head which was nearing my other arm. The Doctor went down and stayed down; perhaps one cannot think to eat one’s patient when one’s head is no longer oval.

Bloody arm in hand; it was time to deal with the rest of them.

Cut
She eventually gets out of the hospital gown and into something with spandex (better to fight in!), acquires her own tank, and a nerdy, lesbian female scientist intern as a side kick!) :smiley: Then I fell asleep.

In real life, I would:

  • Hide behind my husband whimpering. He’s got some power tools, so hopefully he’d be able to board up the house pretty well.
  • If my husband were to become ‘one of the undead’, I would be lost. I am pretty quick and agile, so I might be able to climb onto the roof…but there’s no way I could take on anyone without gun training and a gun. Hopefully the looters with guns would think me worthy of keeping and find me in time!

so, what you’re saying is that zombies (Undead Americans?, the Living Impaired?) are less popular due to not having as good of a PR crew?

you might have a point on the portrayal of zombies, after all, vampires are really popular nowadays, and after all, vampires are simply another variety of reanimated corpse, Vampires seem to have a much better PR crew

so, how do you feel about vampires and vampirism, Winston

you still won’t convince me to join the zombie horde, not as long as i have my trusty ol’ Mossberg Boomstick!
<racks the slide in a menacing manner>

Are you gonna rack it three or four times before you shoot, like they do in some zombie movies? :smiley:

You know, that is so fucking typical of people like you. As soon as anyone starts talking about zombie rights, you’ve got to jump in with that “If we give rights to zombies, then we’re going to have to give rights to vampires, too.” Zombies and vampires are two totally seperate creatures of the night, and I’ll thank you to leave your blood sucking strawmen out of this thread!

nope, why waste perfectly good shotshells, besides, that cool Ka-Chunk sound only seems to intimidate the living, the singlemindedness of the zombies pursuit of “brainnnnsss” and flesh to eat makes them immune to intimidation

I think I’d be screwed.

I don’t live in a very defensible location, nor do I live near one. Well, maybe Fort Ross. It’s a bit old fashioned, but it might do…of course, I’ve never been there myself. It might have gaping holes in the wall, or something.

I don’t own a gun, so I’d have to go find one…if the gun stores haven’t been looted, or aren’t defended by irate store owners, I’d still have to find one. Failing that, I could try Wal*Mart, but I’d probably just find a bunch of friggin’ .22 pea shooters, and some Daisy Red Riders.

I might panic, and try to go for the Sierra Nevadas. But if I didn’t run out of gas, if the freeways aren’t blocked by the National Guard—or just wrecked cars, and roaming zombie hoardes—I probably wouldn’t know where to go to hide in the mountains. It’s not like I have a private cabin waiting. And any of the towns and whatnot would probably be just built-up enough that they’d have their own zombie problem, or they’d have turned into armed enclaves, keeping all outsiders away. Probably both.

Maybe I could make my way to Virginia City, and hole up in an abandoned silver mine. At least the enterance would be easy to defend.

If I were in Detroit, I might make for the abandoned salt mines. They seemed pretty secure, and clean to boot. However, there’d be the problem of light and air supply.

If I were in Switzerland, I might try and hole up in the Jungfraujoch observatory. Aside from the cold, it’d be a pretty nice place to stay. (And very safe.) But it’s on the other side of the planet.

So, in short, I think I’m zombie chow.

I think Bosda has the right idea, and fortunately there are a lot of lakes around here. I would steal a jet ski, stop by The Beer Store and spend the next while hanging out on the one the islands.

I guess I would be screwed if it was cold enough for the lakes to freeze though, I don’t know what I would do then.

Buy some ice skates. I can just see hundreds of zombies falling all over the place trying to eat your brains.

As for me I live in the country and in fact I was thinking of this very scenario. I work at a petrol station right opposite to my house so that would be my first stop. Fill up the cars, grab as much food and random mechanical equipment for weapons as I could and head down the road where the Army do their training. They’re here most of the time and they’ve gotta have rifles and the like. Then from there I might hole up in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, that can’t go wrong. :stuck_out_tongue:

According to The Zombie Survival Guide a .22 is not that bad of a weapon. While lacking the stopping power of a .45 or a shotgun the bullet itself travels fast enough to penetrate the head of a zombie but not go all the way through. Thus the tendency to richochet around the inside of the head disabling the undead.

Posted this a while back, but can’t find where. So, here reproduced for your infotainment :slight_smile: is “The Politics of Zombie Apocalyse” :

In the event of a zombie-based apocalypse, it seems likely that existing governments would tend to fail - the problem they’d be facing would be akin to widespread violent revolt (zombies are violent and numerous) and a massive public health problem (everything from corpses rotting in the streets, and the diseases that come with that, to the shutdown of sanitation services as the workers stopped coming to work, to the potential of contagion from zombies making other people into zombies - I don’t know if Romero’s zombies do that, I know the ones in Resident Evil do.) These, and the inevitable economic collapse and end of respect for the rule of law (cops can’t be everywhere to protect you from the zombies, so you have to protect yourself), are problems that even an exceptionall robust and flexible government would be hard-pressed to survive. The Europeans survived the Black Plague, but I’d argue that governments were held to a much lower standard back then - they weren’t really expected to provide the level of safety for the average person that they are now. Besides, while they did have massive death, they didn’t have zombies. So, I contend that zombie apocalpyse will result in anarchy. Romero seems to agree with me, so I’ll leave this part of my argument as “proven”.

So, now I’m living la vida Hobbesian - how do I keep my life from being nasty, brutish, and short? My first priority, obviously, is protection, both from zombies and humans of ill intent. (The question “Are zombies still human?” can be left for another thread). Hobbes, and many (I’d say most, but I want to be on the safe side) political scientists would argue that the solution people traditionally have to the problem of providing protection from an anarchic, Hobbesian condition is to form states. States can accomplish things that individuals or groups of them simply cannot - for example, they can set up large-scale defensive projects, and organize a society in such a way that people can specialize in tasks for the good of the state. A few people cowering in a barn with shotguns is not a tenable security solution long-term. But let’s say we have many more people working together Then we can have some people be soldiers, others work on corpse-deconstruction, medics, military engineers, farmers, and so on.

Now we’re talking. If you have enough people working together in the ordered framework of a State, they can establish a society that remains stable even in the face of external threats - be they Mongols, neighboring powers, or the soul-less undead.

“But, Mr. Excellent,” I can hear you ask, “The government has failed by this point - and you’ve already explained, in your amazingly sexy way, why it was inevitable that it fall. How can you then propose the creation of a new state?” To that, I have two responses. One is that yes, the formation of a new state would be very difficult, perhaps impossible. But as history and zombie movies both show, States provide the best chance for long-term security - small bands of people do not. So impossible or not, we have to try.

The other answer, and the more optimistic one, is that the old states were not formed in the crucible of zombie infestation, and this one would be. There are all sorts of dire threats today’s nation-states have to face, and most of them deal with them with a high degree of sucess. They suceed because they have an infrastructure, from the setup of the buerocracy to the telephone systems, designed to deal with these threats. They are NOT designed to deal with the undead - but a post-zombie state would be, and I imagine the requirements for a zombie-proof state would become evident very quickly.

So, this is how I imagine a zombie-proof state would be set up. Government on a national scale is neither necessary nor desirable - all communities, with very few exceptions, have graveyards, and so zombies are a problem that are best dealt with on the local level. The ideal state, then, becomes a city-state, as self-sufficient as possible. Democracy would not be ideal here - especially in the early weeks and months of the new State, quick decision making will frequently be necessary - dictatorships are far better than democracies at that.

The new government could come to power in several ways. If the existing local government manages to survive, it could simply assume dictatorial power and set up the new city-state. “Seccession” from the Union wouldn’t be an issue, as I doubt the Union would still exist. If the local government falls, then pretty much anyone can fill the power vacuum - most people will be focusing on survival, and will rally to anyone who can help them achieve it. If you took control of the police station - either through an arrangement with the police, the police being killed by zombies, or you killing the police, then a few dozen of your people driving around town in squad cars shooting zombies could temporarily establish a safe zone, and give the new regime an appearance of legitimacy. After that, it’s just a matter of arranging a secure town meeting to set up the new system, assigning jobs - this post has already gone long enough, I think, no need to get into the real nitty-gritty.

The interesting thing is, if the city-state suceeded, residents of other less sucessful towns might very well wish to be under the protection of your state. A zombie apocalypse could concievably spark the formation of a pretty respectable pocket empire.\

I’d set up a county-wide anti-roaming tax. I’d then initiate the Brains-R-Us Corp., and then go public, each zombie getting a buck-per-share. In time I would ensure that we made a 1.2% annual return-on-investment for the first five years, by selling off spare (but usable) body parts with a part exchange for aluminum cans. In time productivity of cans would increase so that a smaller subsidiary, USe-My-Kaans could be set up. In time this entity would become a Special Purpose Vehicle. Annual turnover would be taxed in the lower tax bracket, taking into account the current federal standard (which will in turn be comprimised by the resulting large scale death and destruction of both local and national businesses and trading utilities). Thus a higher than expected reported profit could be maintained, and additional SPV’s added as a result. The SPV’s would in turn issue thier own shares, which the group shareholders (i.e. Zombie Rights exc.) would be obliged to carry a stake in. The additional liquid assets would increase the strength of the Group, meanwhile any resulting debt (bought through by the lack of any real material profit and rising expenditure costs) could be kept off Zombie Rights Group balance sheet. Eventually, when the company begins to crumble under the weight of mounting debts whilst maintaining a high share price (due to the strong reported annual profits) CEO and CFO of the company (maintained by the companies Charter Code of Conduct) Xavier would sell off my remaining interests to the tune of $2 billion (the cost of keeping the company afloat, maintained by the Companies Arrangement Act - created through involvement with the County Special Activities Board and signed at a meeting of board members and elected officials c.2005 November).

Not sure what I’d do, but i have the feeling that ‘playing dead’ wouldn’t work :wink:

Ideally, I’d have a flame thrower handy. Realistically, I’d probably end up hiding in a church somewhere, hoping someone else will deal with it.

I’d give in, get killed quick, then feast on the yummy, yummy brains for the rest of the movie.