Zombies

I have been doing a little thinking about the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse. Hollywood is bravely doing all that it can to help up prepare, and to provide quality information about the “rules.”

It seems that zombies want to rip us to shreds, consuming all of the yummiest bits.

It would also seem that the way a normal person gets turned into a zombie is by some kind of infection inherent in a zombie bite.

This would mean that most of the people killed upon exposure to hordes of zombies do not, in fact, become zombies themselves. The zombies' behaviour would make sure of that. The only people who can change over are those that survive an attack intact, and yet who have been bitten.

I live on a fairly inaccessible section of Pacific coastline. We are protected by many miles of mountains on one side, and by ocean on the other. One cannot travel here by car.

There are about 25000 to 30000 people who live here. For the sake of argument, let's say a couple of hundred uninfected survivors are still around after the first week or so. How many zombies would they be facing?

What percentage of the remainder will have turned? I can't imagine that very many would have gotten close enough to the business end of zombie teeth without being taken out altogether. Let's call it a quarter who join the undead.

That would have this area occupied by up to 7500 walking dead. That's quite a few, even though I suspect it would be somewhat less.

The good news is that their number will cease to grow. Even if they wipe out our hypothetical 200 survivors, that would only add about 50 to the horde.

With an effectively non-growing number of zombies, attrition will begin to take its toll.

Being only nominally intelligent, they likely won't take common-sense precautions in preventing accident and injury. I suspect they will fall off of and into things on a regular basis.

If you've ever watched zombie shows, you will see that they just don't take care of themselves. They shamble around, bumping into things. They also seem to decay.

How long would an average zombie manage to keep shambling? Assuming they don't heal, friction alone would eventually wear them down to nothing. How long would this take?

Granted, they are a determined lot. If one should walk around until one leg or the other gives out, they would continue to crawl, and eventually claw themselves around.

The implication is clear. Zombies will begin to die out, so to speak, or at least break down.

The game for the survivors becomes to last long enough until the zombies have become extinct. Can this be done?

With no statistics on the rate of zombie demise, it is impossible to tell.

What is clear, is that the number of zombies would be finite, and subject to decay. One of the roles of the terrified survivors should be to speed the process along.

I am always astounded by the tendency of survivors to traverse the post-apocalypse world on motor cycles. Large, durable vehicles should be the order of the day. Survivors should travel in groups, in such vehicles, on their assorted food or ammunition-gathering runs. Zombies should be ruthlessly run down.

Traps are another option. In an early episode of “Walking Dead,” one enterprising survivor had built a large number of clever zombie traps outside of the building he was inhabiting. These were not put up to protect the building, but rather to eliminate zombies.

Such traps would not need to be particularly complex. Wooden frames could be set up that would gently funnel the undead into the trap zone, and into large, sharp objects, or perhaps big, barbed hooks. Shambling into a very-sharp and well-angled blade might just see Mister Zombie cutting himself into pieces. Pits would be good, too.

Sometimes somebody in a zombie movie sets up on a rooftop, from which they use firepower to pick off shufflers. This would be a viable strategy, assuming the shooting platform is safe enough.

These are just a few methods.

Could our 200 survivors outlast the 7500 zombies? It would seem daunting, but not really. Avoidance would also be an effective strategy.

This area of coast is about 85 km long. The second biggest town is at one and, and the biggest is about 30km from there. These two are where half of all the people live, and most of the rest are located in between. This would be where almost all the zombie would be.

Merely by driving up to the less-populated end would put one well away from the majority of the zombies.

It would also be possible to hide out on any of a large number of nearby islands. Many of these are habitable, but uninhabited. That would mean camping in a zombie-free area. There are also islands with small numbers of inhabitants, and therefore very few possible zombies. It is also likely that these spots would be areas that already contain survivors, as zombies might never have made it there at all.

This all applies only to this particular area, but analogies exist in every area. Cities would suck. Los Angeles, for example, contains 18,550,000 people, which would mean a heck of a lot of zombies. The message for survivors should be to, “get the hell out of town.”

In rural areas, the message should be to avoid population centres, set up traps, and play sniper if so inclined.

And to not ride motorcycles.