(Note: This may be more appropriate for Cafe Society, as it’s about the movie “28 Days Later”. If so, my apologies.)
So, one of the Infected bites you, and then runs away/is killed. You have twenty seconds before you turn into a homicidal zombie, and your family is in the room with you. What do you say/do? How do you make sure they kill you? How do you minimize the threat you’ll pose to them after you turn?
My thought, suggested by a scene in the movie: if you can bring yourself to do it, gouge out your eyes. A blind zombie is, presumably, less dangerous than one that can see. Any other thoughts?
This raises an interesting question: is it possible to kill yourself with a strong blow to the trachea, or would there be some kind of mental block that prevented you from doing so?
Immediate suicide seems like a promising tactic, although since I’ve been bitten, I must assume my shotgun is out of ammo.
Run like hell! Maybe I can get far enough away that I’ll be distracted by something else when I turn, or that they have time to prepare for my return.
Restrain myself. With moderate forethought, I have been carrying handcuffs, which I promptly use to attach myself to something immovable. Locking myself in a car trunk, closet, etc. is also an option.
Warn them. “I’m turning! I’m turning! Shoot me! SHOOT ME!” Only works if my companions are pretty coldly pragmatic.
Leap on the zombie that bit me and fight ferociously. He might succeed in killing or incapacitating me, or I might do the same to him. Either way, my companions are now faced with only one injured zombie, rather than two healthy ones.
Where was I bitten? Do I have a chainsaw to lop off any bad appendages quickly? Can I replace it with a bionic part when I get sucked back to the middle ages?
If you can convince your family to kill you within 20 seconds, there’s not a whole lot of love there in the first place, is there?
You could try running away, but 20 seconds later you would just do a u-turn and come back to wipe them out. You could try suicide, but unless it was a quick-acting poison, your family would rush forward and cradle your bloody body in terror, infecting themselves anyway. Remember, an infection doesn’t die the instant you do, so you’d have to find a way in 20 seconds to:
Kill yourself in a manner that doesn’t throw blood around willy-nilly, and
Convince you family, friends and all passersby to stay the hell away from your body.
Well, if I lived on the edge of a cliff, I’d be all set; I could run out and - WHEEEEE! - plunge into the abyss to my death.
But I don’t live on the edge of a cliff. I live in a safe, peaceful suburban neighborhood, which is a definite liability in this situation. And since I’ve been wracking my brains fruitlessly on this for a few minutes, I doubt I’d be able to figure out what to do with my 20 seconds if it actually happened. I expect I’d scream and run around like a chicken with its head off. Maybe my family would be smart enough to know what was up, and would knock me off and get away from me. I’ll leave it to them.
One of the blessings if the Second Amendment is that here in America, my loved ones will have the legally purchased firepower to blow me away should I be infected. Being able to shoot one of the infected with a shotgun is much safer than hand-to-hand killing with a machete or baseball bat, which leaves way too much chance of exposure to the virus through blood spatter in the mucosa or through being bitten.
And unlike your shopping mall undead zombies, these are living, albeit infected, humans, so destroying the brain is not required. A shot right to the heart or lungs will kill an infected quite effectively.
If I’m at home, I let someone know, and then I jump off the balcony onto the pavement below and have one of them run me over. I jump with about five seconds left and try to land head-first. No guns around and the lawnmower would be too messy.
Allow me to elaborate: you’re with your family, OR someone else you actually like/love. What then?
