I would not survive.

I wouldn’t.

These survivalist fantasies where people paint themselves as capable and not fodder…

Hell, you outlast the outbreak/bomb you’ll probably die of sepsis the first time you get a bad cut or a tooth that goes rotten.

If it is truly the apocalypse, you are best just letting go, because what follows after is like the end of night out at a club when they turn the lights on.

Wizard Island is a 5 hour drive. Deep freshwater lake, surrounded by water on all sides. Fish. In a volcanic crater so any zombies coming have to summit the volcano first, then be visible on the rim before getting to the water, where they sink.

It’d be just my luck that I wouldnt die quickly, being forced to trudge through worse and worse conditions.

I might survive the zombies by not going outside like a shut-in but then die from something stupid like accidentally tripping over a rock.

Join the zombies 🧟

Driving (and living in) an 18-wheeler, I’ve got shelter and transportation already sorted. Got all the comforts of home on board. Enough food and water to last a couple weeks, maybe a month if I had to. I can carry enough fuel to drive ~2500 miles if I ditched my trailer, or to run my APU for nearly a year in “standby” mode. Sure, replacing that fuel once it’s gone would be tricky, but it’s a diesel. There are plenty of alternative fuel sources out there.

I suppose my plan would be to run away from civilization, but off the beaten path so as to not get stuck in the mother of all traffic jams. No need to go that far; a few dozen, maybe a couple hundred miles down a non-interstate highway should be sufficient to avoid most humans/zombies. Plenty of random warehouses and parking lots out in the middle of nowhere.

Then it’d be a matter of relaxing for a few weeks, keeping my head down, and listening to the radio for any news about a safe zone or what have you.

By running faster than the people around me.

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Poorly.

I could last a bit. We have outdoorsy supplies and can do without electricity, but it’s probably inevitable I’d just wind down or lose focus once and that’ll be that.

Defensive Plants

I probably wouldn’t

I believe it’s generally accepted that zombies can’t climb, or at least, they are really bad at it. So you basically just need to take the high ground. If you can get up a ladder or something, you would basically be safe and could easily pick off any zombies below with a spear or other ranged weapon.

Long term, I would probably go to the mountains, find a clean water source and plant crops. The mountainous terrain would be a big obstacle and most zombies probably wouldn’t even try to go up. For any that do, I could probably set up some traps to lead them off an edge where they would fall back to the bottom.

I wouldn’t. I have an extroverted, anxious child who doesn’t know how to be quiet or careful.

Stage 1: Find some sort of weapon and defend my home. Take normal emergency procedures, accounting for food, filling bath tubs with water, propane to cook with, etc. I live in a mid density burb, so probably the zombies wouldnt be too dense. Unfortunately, my slidine glass back door and a few large windows would make my hose less than excellently defensible. But my attic is accessible only via retractable ladder, and would be an excellent option. Upon the house being breeched, I could climb up there and stab zombies in the eyes with a sharp pointy on a long stick. With a bit of kicking and breaking, I could make a passage onto the roof, which would be nice if the attic got especially hot or to communicate with surviving neighbors. Crux will be avoiding attracting a hoard, and rationing water.

Stage 2: from the roof, start contacting neighbors who are also in their homes. Start getting together, organizing, pooling supplies. Get together in the most defensible house in the neighborhood. Set up parties to collect water, food, and weapons, but otherwise stay relatively hunkered down. Daily bite inspections mandatory, obviously. Crux will be not attracting a hoard, and maintaining community stability and organization. Eventually, food will start to run low as we deplete the neighborhood’s pantries.

Stage 3: The hoard will likely have concentrated downtown by now. Food is running low, but the local theat has also receded significantly. Time to go on the offensive. Send out scouting parties to gather intelligence on hoard position, and develop tactics for avoiding drawing the hoard to our base. Contact other cells of survivors, but be careful not to disclose our base location. Stockpile weapons, food, water, and vehicles as much as possible. Also, walkie talkies for improved communication. Crux will be not attracting the attention of hostile survivors to our base.

Stage 4: We go on the offensive. We outfit our convoy of vehicles as best as we can, and head towards downtown. Previous scouting missions will have mapped out a path clear of obstructions. Scouting day-of would route us on a path with minimal hoard density. We would quickly arrive at our destination - the city’s hockey arena. We park the convoy to set up a perimeter around the staff entrance, and defend that perimeter as we break through the door. Making it through the door will be the crux, as the commotion of breaking through it will likeli alert any zombies nearby inside, as well as any outside who hadnt already noticed our convoy. However, the chokepoint of the door is an advantage to us, and we can stick them with sharp pointies on long sticks as they come for us until we catch a break.

From here, it is on. We sprint into the arena and go up as fast as possible, doing our best not to get bogged down. Zombies are not very coordinated, so the higher we go, the easier the going gets. At the top of the stands, we can vault out of the nosebleeds and into the press box, where we should be safe for a while as the hoard climbs the stands after us. Breaking down a few more doors from here, and we will have access to our destination: the catwalks.

120’ above the arena floor, there are a few catwalks, and importantly, a grid of beams forming the structure of the arena’s roof and walls. As quick as we can, we reach the safety of the beams, and then get to work removing the guardrails from the catwalks. And then… we wait. The initial zombies which followed us to the press box will soon arrive. But zombies are both dumb and not coordinated. So I can sit on a 6" box beam indefinitely. But a zombie on a catwalk with no handrail will see me, walk towards me, and plummet 120’ down to the arena floor. Splat! We don’t do much. Just sit there as the zombies walk over the edge and fall to their doom one by one. As the stream relents, we go out on scouting missions, attracting isolated groups up and guiding them to the abyss. Eventually we conduct a room by room search, ensuring the building is clear. From there, we radio to the convoy, and we start moving our supplies in. Everything goes to the beams - food, water, hammocks, batteries.

Stage 5: We remove our convoy barricade, and the hoard starts to flow in. We lead them up to the catwalks, and one by one, they leap to their doom. The arena has a 700,000 sqft field. A human body only takes up about 2 cubic feet. My metro’s population is about 3 million. So we need 6,000,000 cubic feet of volume for dead bodies. Luckily, that is just about 8.5’ off the ground for the 700,000 sqft field. Even accounting for the fact that the zombies won’t liquify then they crater, that is plenty of margin for error when we have 120’ to work with. Sure, not all the zombies will die in the fall - but physics is physics, and zombies with broken legs and shattered rib cages sure won’t be moving very fast.

We draw in huge numbers of zombies at once, wait for them to extinguish themselves, then barricade the entrance once more and conduct room by room searches and manually kill any survivors. These are also nice breaks for resupplies from our survival cell outside. Then the outside cell runs a convoy through the city and draws in another part of the hoard. After a couple weeks, large hoards should cease to be a thing in the metro area.

Stage 6: We run systemic searches of the metro to search for smaller, breakoff hoards, which are then drawn to the arena. After these are cleared, life can become a bit more normal. The city will divide into neighborhoods, each operating as an independent defence cell. Walls are built around each neighborhood both to keep zombies out and to serve as a defence against our breaks in adjacent cells. Room by room searches are conducted of the whole metro area. Unfortunately, by this point, food supplies for the whole city will likely be running low.

We will have a very hard winter.

Stage 7: With global supply chains now collapsed, we start growing our own food on every available surface. When we aren’t farming staple crops, we are busy building a city perimeter wall, lest another hoard come through.

Stage 8: we continue living