Zombies.
Zombies. Yup. Zombies. They are real folks and we have to be prepared for this menace. There’s lots of misinformation out there regarding Zombies, their origins and how and what to use to kill them.
Really none of that is important. It doesn’t matter if Zombies exist, (they do, I totally suspect our greeter at the local Wal-Mart) all that matters is that we, as Americans, are prepared to deal with them. It’s our duty.
So anyway it’s a matter of preparedness. And preparedness sucks because it’s a lot of work. I’ll give you the ground work, because I’m learning this myself, and you take the heck off with this knowledge and make it your own.
Any Zombie event is going to ultimately be a siege. You’re going to shelter in place. So make your place safe to shelter. Start with your landscaping, this guy has all kinds of tips on home security based landscaping ideas. Keep in mind that you don’t want any trees to close enough to your house to allow a Zombie to climb to your roof, or close enough that a tree cut down or set a blaze won’t effect your house. A wide open lawn allows you to have a clear field of fire for on coming Zombie hordes. Face it, when/if the Zombies come they will come in droves.
You’ll need plenty of lights in your yard, a dog couldn’t hurt. At the very least it’d distract the Zombies a bit.
Now if you’re going to ride out an “incident“ in your home you are going to need some things. Food for one.
Now I don’t care how you feel about the Mormons (their people put down an early Zombie uprising in Utah way back when) and it doesn’t matter, them guys know a thing or two about stocking up on edibles. Read and learn from their info. Don’t let their rhetoric snake you away from the FSM or his noodly goodness. There’s really nothing religious about stocking up on food, it’s just good practice. Zombies or not, a three month supply of vittles will seem damn handy if someone in the family loses a job, becomes to ill to work or another family type emergency. That aside, if you’re going to hole up in your house and ride out a Zombie apocalypse you’re going to need food.
Firearms aren’t optional. Well I guess technically they are, but really, you don’t want to be without a means to defend yourself if the Zombies uprise and society goes to hell. Our whole law enforcement system is a responsive system, which means they can’t do shit for you during an incident. Only afterward. And in something like a riot, Zombie uprising or other natural disaster they are going to busy with their own problems.
If you don’t believe in firearms (they exist, I seen em!) that’s fine, skip this or read it for giggles. If you do, you probably have some, if you do and don’t have any read on. I’ll give you a simple primer, that is to say, I’ll tell you things as I understand them.
Realistically you only need three guns. Maybe four, but three will get a guy by. Seriously though once you get locked in on gun buying you can’t stop. It’s a bad bug to catch. So the four and their reasoning:
1. A Rifle: Be it Semi-Auto or Bolt Action it don’t matter. The point is the nice long barrel and possibly (hopefully?) a scope will let you reach out and deal with a threat before it can get close enough to deal with you. Plus, these sort of rifles can be used to put food on the table. A deer rifle is a “sportsman” gun during deer season and a Zombie defense weapon the rest of the year. Go for something like a 30-06 (thirty-ott six), or a .308 (three-oh-eight). Both will kill anything in North America. The .308 is what NATO uses, so if they’re involved you can get ammo from them.
2. A Shotgun or Carbine rifle: A shot gun is what you’d use for up close and personal grizzly kinda work. They are nice, because as you know you have to shoot a Zombie in the head and since a Shotgun loaded with Buckshot contains many smaller bullet sized projectiles your odds of getting a shot to the head goes way up. The downside is, the further out your target the more the pellets are going to spread or “pattern” and the less likely you are to get them where they need to be. Since the shotguns we are after are going to be a shorter barrel self defense model, this pattern opens up at a closer distance. A Carbine is handy because you can get one to take the same shell as your handgun. Sometimes even the same magazine (clips, except clips go in your hair seriously gun nuts like to be DICKS to neophytes about these little things). Both these weapons are short range weapons, the main difference is accuracy and reach. The Carbine has more reach and needs more accuracy. The Shotgun needs less accuracy, but has less reach. Make a decision. If you live in pheasant country, you can hunt with the shotgun and you get to buy a nifty orange vest.
3. A Handgun: These are nifty. I like em. They also take the most effort to learn to shoot, are the most dangerous to their user, and cause the most in home accidents. So you have to be careful. Kids love these damned things and you have to educate them and keep them locked up. Now on the bright side, they are the easiest weapon to have on you at all times. Get a Concealed Weapons Permit for your area (if possible/necessary) and you’ll have a little peace of mind waiting for something bad to happen. I personally carry a revolver, a .38spl. I like it. You don’t have to worry about jamming, dud rounds, or that sort of thing. With Semi-automatic handguns you have to a “tap, rack and reload” drill to get your gun to function again. Costing time. And it’s a pain in the ass. With a revolver, when you get a dud round (one that doesn’t go off) you just pull the trigger again and move on with your life. The down side is my revolver holds five shots, a higher capacity revolver can hold 6 and some awesome ones 8. A semi-auto can hold many, many more rounds. It starts at 8 and then the sky is the limit.
The trick with a pistol, or any gun for that matter, but particularly a pistol is to shoot it often, keep it clean and well oiled and in good shape. Practice makes perfect. And also learn these shooting rules, they are of utmost importance. Teach them to your kids. Even if you don’t have one in your house, teach your kids about gun safety. Might save their skin.
So now we’ve covered Security, Food and Guns. What else do you need in a zombie uprising? A melee weapon!
I like Machetes. They’ll get stuck in the hard bone of a skull though, but they’ve been used exclusively in Africa for all sorts of nefarious deeds with a lot of grisly success. Fiskars makes this thing, and I sort of love it. I also think a tomahawk shows a lot of potential. It’s light, it’s sharp, it’s basically a modern version of the belt axes medieval archers carried. Plus if you get one with a hammer head you can use it for all sorts of other things. Like Camping. Or smashing spiders. A medieval morning star has some promise too, but isn’t as useful around the house like a machete, brush hook or tomahawk.
So be vigilante, be prepared and be ready an uprising can happen at any time. Make yourself a bug out bag, buy some paracord, and keep ready.
I didn’t go into how to kill a zombie, because that’s not important. Popular Culture says aim for the head. I’ll go with that. But add that most of the Zombies we are going to run into and have to protect ourselves from “center of mass” (the torso essentially, where a person keeps their organs handy) will work just fine. Most of the zombies we are likely to meet aren’t the brain chasing undead sort. They are the intruder at 2am. The thugs who saw you move your new big ole Plasma Screen into your house or the methheads who thought you weren’t home. Our incidents are going to be things like civil unrest (I think we’re due), power outages, riots, tornadoes, those sorts of things that make a little home security and a well stocked pantry a FSM-send.
We like to think the best of people, but you only have to look at what went down after hurricane Katrina to see who flimsy the veil of our civility and the effectiveness of our policing system is. I mean really. You’re personal safety and security is in your hands, not your governments.
Hopefully this sort of thing never happens to you, me or mine. But if it does, at least we’ll be ready and if it never happens, well it’s sorta fun to plink on a lazy Saturday with the kids and wife, to hunt in the early am for deer, elk or pheasant. And that extra food in this shitty economy sure makes for a lot of peace of mind.
With reanimation, one thing to keep in mind is, they’ve got the decomposition thing going against them. Humans hang in long enough, and the undead eventually just fall apart.
True dat Rob. But you gotta keep in mind that whatever the zombie triggering mechanism is (virus, fungus, space dust, voodoo) could also trigger some sort of anti-rotting tendencies. I don’t know the sky is the limit. Will the zombies free in the winter and thaw in the summer? Will mankind be doomed to live out their existence in arctic environments?