Tomorrow morning, you wake up with an extra 50 billion US dollars in your bank account. You ring up your bank and they it is real and your benefactor has left a message for you.
<<Morning deary, I’ve got some good news and bad news. The good news is the money is really yours, no strings attached, the bad news is, I’ve forseen the end and it ain’t pretty, in ten years an airborne virus kills and reanimates 95% of the human population into shambler zombies. And you think that’s bad, the few who are immune to the aeriel variant will be turned in days from just a little bite.
Do what you will, believe me or not, but when the potential cost of inaction is extinction, you’ll regret trying your hardest to prevent it.>>
**
What do you do?**
*To prevent this becoming too easy, you are magically prevented from advertising pre-disease or trying to gain political power. *
Hmm, there’s no mention from the benefactor that I’m immune, so I’ll have to assume a 95% probability that I’m a dead man walking. I’d buy a small island and live it up for my remaining time. I’d put a little effort and money into a bunker, solar power, sustainable crops and sailboats for fishing, in case anyone on the island is immune and able to kill off those who aren’t. I wouldn’t turn the island into some kind of crazy survivalist camp. I’d just quietly ensure there were enough resources available (a few guns, medicine, and such) on my tourist/nature preserve island for someone to have a chance. Oh, and I’d leave lots of video cameras laying around so the whole cataclysm could eventually be turned into a kick-butt movie by whoever finds the footage.
The first thing I’d do is buy up the rights to a certain Disney character and erase every trace of her.
You have to assume that the benefactor knows you won’t be one of those initially infected, otherwise he wouldn’t have sent you the money.
Ellison paid $500 million for Lanai. $50 billion could get you the big island, with enough left over to mine the shit out of the beaches and build enclaves. Stock them well, bring in a wide selection of people with the needed talents, and make every one of them wear a necklace full of C4. Any attempt to remove the necklace and “Boom.” When Der Tag arrives, monitor all members for zombie-ism. Detonate as needed.
I’d buy some armored personnel carriers. If I am immune to the airborne virus and only affected by being bitten, then an APC would let me kill zombies w/o any risk to myself.
I’ve never found zombie movies realistic in the sense that people are so easily intimidated by them. Zombies are dumb, move on foot, unarmed and have to make physical contact to harm you. Plus a lot seem easy to trick because they respond to beeping sounds or the sight of a non-infected human. A fireteam in an APC could kill thousands a day without any real problem. A thousand fire teams in a thousand APCs means millions of zombies dying. It’d be no different than killing wild game, except wild game hides from you while zombies chase you.
5% of the human race is still 350 million people. That is assuming the virus spreads to the entire world.
So basically, find a city that is surrounded by water on all sides, or at least on 3 sides. San Francisco, Long Island, coronado, etc. Prepare by stockpiling whatever weapons work best against zombies, buying armored suits, armored vehicles, etc. Then when it happens kill all of the zombies on the island, and use it as a base. Then start traveling out into the rest of the country to kill the rest of them.
I’m certainly not going to argue with you on the military aspects of the problem, Wesley Clark ;). My “nature preserve island” solution was an effort to avoid advertising the true purpose for buying the island. I’d like the community to be as close to self-reliant as possible well before “Z Day” (my term) to minimize basic survival issues for the survivors. I think I’d set the whole thing up as a continuation of that Bio Dome experiment from the 90s (the one that the Pauly Shore documentary was based on). Heck, that might even get me some sponsors from universities or GM-crop companies, saving me some money, and bringing engineers, doctors and other highly-skilled folks to the island.
I think I’d also have to adopt some Howard Hughes-type peculiarities to avoid suspicion. I could say I’m completely terrified of typhoons to explain why I want bunkers in place all over the island. Guns? Terrified of boars.
I see the problem in three parts: 1) preparation for, 2) transition and 3) long-term recovery from Z Day. My $50b can only be applied to preparation, so I want to have some means in place to “survive the survivors” once the Zeds are all taken care of. I could use the island’s crops and fishing products to build my empire after Z Day. I’d definitely want some experts on Polynesian history and culture to help shape the island’s future, since I see adopting an existence of, say, the Hawaiian islands before Captain Cook as the best way to approach transition and long-term recovery. I’d probably want to arm my fishing boats to discourage pirates. I could say I’m terrified of whales or something.
Easy. 50 billion should build me a pretty sweet arctic base. Zombies can’t shamble at arctic temperatures (cite: Zombie Survival Guide) and I’d be more or less safe from regular human marauders, too.
Me and my hand-picked team of survivors would hole up for a few years in comfort and come out after the zombies have all decomposed.
Put the money to good use, on living a very large lifestyle (a couple sports teams, an Island, private jet, yacht, gold toilets etc) and learn how to operate submarines successfully. In 10 years lease the biggest submarine I’m able to and go off (or, actually, under) for a few weeks with my nearest and dearest.
The thing about Zombie Apocalypses is that people underestimate how fast you can kill them all. If you killed one every 5 seconds for 8 hours a day, that’s 5760 zombies per day. 200 survivors could kill the entire population of Dallas, TX, by the end of the day.
So my strategy is always the same: Build or find a concrete structure with minute gaps between barriers. Have one person stationed at each gap to just keep braining zombies with a spike. They’ll keep comin’ and you’ll keep stabbin’. Eventually the bodies will pile up so high that continued combat is unnecessary. So then you bring out the roving slice-‘n’-dice vehicles that just chop up anything that gets close.
With this strategy, your average high school senior class could cleanse an entire major U.S. city by nightfall.
Somewhere in northern New Mexico or Colorado is a nice mountainside where I would build a really nice house. Beneath this house and deep into to mountain I would have built vast caverns for living spaces and storage for food. Heavy doors would seal the underground section off and complex ventilation would provide clean, disease-free air. The whole complex would be powered by geothermal energy and/or wind turbines on the ridge above. At the the first signs of the zombie apocalypse I would retreat into my lair with my family and wait it out while Wesley and Chessic get things cleaned up.
You misunderstood (and I didn’t explain it well). I mean spend the money & the next 10 years researching a way to protect all people from **all *airborne viruses. A new preventive medicine.
*Of course, if this was an episode of The Twilight Zone, it will be my funded research to prevent the plague that somehow triggers the plague.
Buy several islands in the thousand islands near the swifter parts of the St. Lawrence. Stock up on food / replacement parts / easily repairable weapons / construction and repair materials. You will need a few boats; some motored, some not. Also, some kind of buoy-moored fencing to catch “drifters” so they can’t climb over and so that when they roll off the sides, the current takes them down stream (and away from) your island(s).
You’ll need plenty of fishing supplies and repairable boats able to make it out to the Grand Banks area and back. Occasional land raids might be necessary to plant/harvest/forage crops/vegetables. Luckily, since there is wine country in that region, you won’t have a lot of concrete construction-pollution to dig up before you can plant crops in dirt. You’ll need books on a range of subjects, especially medicine & a good supply of ones that can’t be low-tech created easily.
I think the biggest adjustment would be the adjustment of your group to survival mode as well as its thinking away from an internet based computer engineering based model to a more mechanical engineering based one. Also, you’ll need to recognize that while bullets can’t last forever (and you’re at bows, machetes & bats at that point) zombies can’t either. It might take 10-15 years, but unfed ones would have to lose functionality, rot, and disintegrate.
Preparing for that eventuality, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to have burried in various spots shipping containers and 18-wheeler trailers for supplies for decades into the future when your group begins to repopulate the mainland areas, county by county.
