Technically, “Hi, Opal!” should always be third and if you say it nice enough and as personable as possible you might lure her out into the open as zombie bait while you make your own escape! 
There is also a word that will make her run away, but we aren’t allowed to say it unless it comes up in context. If the discussion goes to Zombie Deer though, all bets are off.
Quoth Lust4Life:
Food also won’t be a problem for the zombies, if they use your brains.
I’m glad to see someone already mentioned the Zombie Survival Guide upthread. Lots of good stuff in there.
Part of the problem with zombie movies is that it seems like the very concept of a zombie just doesn’t exist to the heroes. They always seem surprised when they learn that it’s spread by a bite or whatever. I think this is a large part of why they make so many mistakes. This is also the sort of knowledge that can be leveraged to maximize survivability. If you do have to be mobile, you’ll need some kind of armor, particularly on easily biteable areas like the arm and neck.
Guns are great for fighting off large numbers, but in most situations, it’s not necessary as one or two are going to be slow moving, so they’re easily outrun or killed. Worse, using a gun creates a lot of noise which could potentially attract other zombies. Finally, barring a situation where you’re locked up in or near a gun store, ammo will be very limited, so it’s best to save it for emergencies and potentially hunting. Instead, bladed weapons seem like the most practical to me and can easily be used to incapacitate one or a small handful of zombies.
I’m also not sure about that remaining mobile is necessary. Consider, unless they’re super-natural, zombies are going to get injured, die/decay, or just run out of energy relatively quickly. As such, being able to survive a siege for a few weeks may, in fact, be enough, even in a large scale infestation. Even better, because their brains are barely functional, if you can remain out of sight and mask your smell, chances are they wouldn’t even bother you, which would potentially allow for some excursions. I think being able to hold up in a well supplied area (like a mall) or being able to make occassional excursions for supplies ought to be enough to survive through the worst of it, in the case of a large scale attack.
By remaining mobile, you may be able to refresh your supplies, but will also only be limited to what you can carry. This may be a solid plan in the case of a localized or medium sized attack, because you can potentially escape the infected zone or meet up with other survivors, but it does carry a lot of risk. Perhaps would could assume an infestation is small or medium and try the mobile approach, see where it gets them, then choose later to hold up in a fortified location.
Either way, I’m plenty ready for either strategy. Safe location? Top floor with roof access. Escape route? Less than a mile from an interstate. Plethora of bladed weapons? Check. Armor? Check. Gun and ammo? Okay, I need that. Food? At least three abundant sources of food within a half mile and can quickly restock at the start of an out break.
Do zombie deer attend The Ohio State University?
What do we want?
BRAINS!
When do we want them?
BRAINS!
I’ve always wondered about the inevitability of being overrun if you hole up. I have a pretty small place where the door is completely blocked in by three sturdy 5’ high brick walls and a metal gate. The only first-floor windows accessible outside the walls are two small high windows that would be difficult even for a normal human to break out and climb through. Presuming Romero zombies, I just can’t see that they have any kind of chance at getting in, even if they knew I was in there. Lock the gate latch so they can’t accidentally knock it loose, and you’re golden. Supplies are of course the problem, but barring that it’s a solid defense.
Other zombie types, especially the fast aggressive 28 Days Later kind, would be able to leap the wall, but that’s usually not the kind of zombie involved in full-scale invasions.
I am admittedly not well-versed in zombie lore. Do all or most zombies hunt by smell?
I’ve thought about this a lot, and it really depends on the type of zombies, how the ‘zombiness’ is spread, and if animals can become infected or not.
The thing is, if the zombies are dead people, and if animals can’t become infected, they won’t last long. The natural predators will start picking people off very quickly, frost bite will quickly set in in colder climates, heat will knock them out in warmer climates, there are a lot of natural barriers that they won’t be able to cross, and (in most depictions), they are very slow and can be kicked both at a distance and up close, while they need to be close to infect others.
My personal pick for this scenario is Lake Tahoe. A lot of the Lake Tahoe houses have bear guards such as giant sheets of wood/metal that cover the windows like garage doors. If it’s in the winter, I doubt the zombies will get to me. If it’s spring/summer, I’ll stock up on food and supplies to last until winter. I suspect that bears will take care of most of the problem for me. You can also knock out some key bridges to isolate the area and stop more zombies from wandering up. Since it’s high up in the mountains, I think it would simply take most zombies too long to walk there. They’d be killed by nature before they could get there.
Even in a city, I’d suggest holing up somewhere and waiting for nature to come clear the zombies out. A place like New York City might take a while, but I think that even that would be eventually over run by animals looking to prey on easy to kill food. Escaping to the tropics would also be a great idea. I’ve seen animals eaten to bones in two days in the tropics. Zombies would not survive - especially in the rainy season.
If animals can be become infected, you are completely fucked. We’d never be able to get rid of the virus.
If the zombies aren’t dead and act as though they are infected with some sort of rage virus (like in 28 Days Later), they will be harder to kill. I think we can still rely on nature taking them out (at a much slower rate), but we can’t rely on the elements to work as well. I still think that cold and heat would slow them down (if not kill them), unless they are intelligent enough to protect themselves.
In this case, I think the best bet would be to head towards the mountain/deserts. Again, I’d pick a place like Lake Tahoe where there is a abundance of wildlife for me to rely on should my supplies run low, and to help me pick off the zombie population.
Most extremely virulent diseases (like ebola) end up not being that bad because it’s not in the nature of the virulent disease to run amok and kill the host before the disease can be spread. Think about rabies. Rabies is scary as fuck when you think about it and very similar to zombies - spread by bite, makes the infected creature try to bite other creatures, etc. A zombie disease (super rabies) isn’t a disease that would last very long unless it had quite a long incubation period before it made the host go crazy. If it did have a long incubation, I think people would notice the disease and be able to treat it/find cures relatively early on. Look at how quickly we shut down SARS and stopped that from spreading. The zombie invasion is only dangerous when it’s swift and fast moving.
Provided that animals couldn’t also be infected (and again, there you are fucked unless the disease burns itself out too quickly), I don’t think you would have to wait long at all for the infected humans to be taken care of by nature or other humans.
Were it me, I think I’d jump straight to Number Three. After all, movies ranging from The Serpent and the Rainbow to *The Crazies *have taught me that widespread zombification and similar phenomena often stem from government corruption, incompetence, or outright evil . . . sometimes the government poses more of a threat to unaffected/uninfected humans than zombies or similar creatures ever could.
I don’t share your optimism for this fiction situation when I think of the response to New Orleans after Katrina.
Max Brooks addressed this in The Zombie Survival Guide. The virus that creates his zombies also causes all scavengers (from bacteria to buzzards) to avoid zombies. They do get even slower the colder they get and freeze solid, but can still function when they thaw out.
That or just isolate and euthanize the infected before they turn.
Although he doesn’t explain why zombies in hot dry climates don’t completely dry out into jerky.
That would be a great movie. Poor people, abandoned by their government, living in the Superdome, surrounded by water…and zombies. Then the first refugess in the the Superdome show signs of infection.
You could have some great shots of submerged zombies walking toward some attractant, with just the ripples of their passage showing at the surface. All the great features of a Disaster movie, a zombie movie and Jaws, rolled into one.
I got the perfect title: Dome Of The Dead. When there’s no more room on the bleachers the dead will walk the field.
This could be a great movie, and there’s even a potential origin story. When this happened, I remember people joking about whether the resulting zombies would be fast-moving or slow.
That article actually made some good points (even though zombies are supernatural and seem to defy many of those rules anyway). And thanks - this made me laugh out loud:
But let’s say there is an outbreak, like if one zombie was able to bite 30 people in the crowd at an Insane Clown Posse concert before they figured out it wasn’t part of the show…
Well, things depends on the specific mythology of the zombie outbreak.
But generally, the best strategy would seem to be to have a really good motorcycle, really good motorcycle skills, some sort of gas station gas siphoning device, a blunt object for groceries, some kind of legally available zombie dropping gun, and a radio headset to keep apprised of current events.