It’s Monday Mayhem and you know what that means—yep, zombies running amok making life miserable for all humanity.
Large Urban Area
If you’ve read my Zombie Apocalypse: Ground Zero post last week, I wrote how I believed if a zombie apocalypse were take place it would happen in a large urban area. Some have commented that it would be more difficult to detect the event in a rural area instead, thus a challenge to contain.
Regardless of where it happens, we’d still have to find ways to defend ourselves. In my post Zombie Kill of the Week, I wrote a detailed list of how I’d like to see zombies killed. As amusing as it was writing that post, some truth remains: If a zombie were to enter our house, what would we do? It’s fun saying we’d love to jam an ice pick in the soft part of its temple but if we didn’t have an ice pick, it ain’t goin’ die by lookin’ at the thing and screamin’. That’s a fact.
So, what are we to do? What would you do?
Here are a few tips you can use in the event the world collapses and the zombies begin knocking on your door.
Typical Front Door
Do not open the door. Simple, right? Wrong. Those resilient maggot bags will stop at nothing if they hear life creaking inside your house. Don’t assume they’ll show up in the middle of the day either. Expect the unexpected. They can appear anytime. If you have a snorer in the house, lock ‘em in a windowless room in the basement. You don’t need those miserable gut suckers chomping on anyone in your household at three in the morning. Bar all the doors with deadbolts and chairs. Board up your windows and make only one door your access point. Dictate which door they can use.
Keep weapons handy. If zombies make it into the house, let their first greeting be a bullet to the head. Nothing says hello like a .357 Magnum. Be careful though, a gunshot will alert the others and instead of fending off one, you’ll have to deal with a whole neighborhood full of scab festerers. That’s why it would be a good idea to keep an assortment of garden tools interspersed throughout the house. A shovel can perform the duel role of cracking skulls and burying the remains. A hoe can function in a similar manner. Again, always think of the multiple uses for these tools. Now let’s say one of these brain eaters chases you around the house. What are you going to do? Sporting equipment works good too. Wouldn’t it be a relief to know at the end of a hall you can grab a baseball bat and beat the living tar out of these zombies? There’s nothing like hearing the crack of a Louisville Slugger upside the head of an undead.
Plan an escape route. If worse comes to worse and the whole house gets overrun with those walking fly heaps, the next and best course of action is to—RUN! Don’t stick around. Don’t even look back. You cannot afford to stay in the house any longer. Take what you can carry and head for the hills. Your life depends on it. If you’d planned ahead, you would have left a loose bottom board to one of the ground floor windows to make it easy for you to kick in and crawl through. Better still, you could have rigged the whole house to explode with you and your family safely halfway to the woods. This would ensure the zombies would remain in the house and you wouldn’t have to worry about stragglers chasing you.
Prepare a secondary home. As with any plan there should always be a Plan B. If something should happen to your primary residence, it would be beneficial to have a secondary residence in mind to act as your temporary home. This could be anything from a barn, a tent in the woods to a shed. Anything that will function as a place where you can lay your head without worrying if you’ll still have a head by morning.
These are only a few tips to keep those vermin beasts at bay while you plan your escape for the coast and hop on a boat for the nearest island away from it all.
What are your plans for the zombie apocalypse? Have you figured out an escape route? Will you be heading to an island somewhere in the Caribbean?
I’ve always wondered if a zombie apocalypse were to take place now, where would it hit first? It’s Monday Mayhem and this has been on my mind all weekend.
According to zombie folklore, zombies become zombies when a virus infects and kills a victim. The victim rises from the dead as a zombie and carries on the cycle of infection by biting other victims. That is, if there’s anything left of the victims after the zombie attacks. Zombies are known to have a voracious appetite for human flesh and will do anything to consume as much of it as possible.
Which begs the question I asked earlier: Where in the world would a zombie apocalypse have a greater chance of beginning?
Let’s use some logic and think about this for a moment. It would be fair to assume a typical zombie virus falls under the category of designer viruses engineered to deliver its payload to as many victims as possible. Obviously, no one in their right mind would volunteer to release such a virus into the population, therefore, should it happen, it would happen by accident.
Contagion’s a Game
Okay, how about location? For a virus of this magnitude to cause such devastation, the lab would have to be located near a huge population. Like a city. I did a quick search on Google for labs located near large populations and found one just outside a metropolis in a quaint suburb. Located across the street is a hotel.
Forgive me if I’m naïve, because sometimes I don’t get things right away. But if this lab should ever have a breach, isn’t it reasonable to say the hotel across the street would fall victim to the contagion first? Don’t hotels contain travelers? Travelers need airports. Aren’t airports in cities? If a whole city gets infected by these busy travelers, wouldn’t the likelihood of the contagion spreading to surrounding communities increase? And let’s not forget the infected flying out of the city. Where are they heading? Europe? Africa? China?
Now, let’s say, for the sake of argument, I’m wrong. Let’s pretend a zombie apocalypse starts in a rural community first. What are the chances of it stretching its legs beyond the borders of a small town? Do you think the military would allow it? I don’t know. Seems unlikely. The military’s response is quick when it comes to these types of situations. They’d have the location secured once they see zombies running around town trying to make meals of its residents. They’d then execute a containment protocol to prevent the spread from affecting outlining regions.
No, a zombie apocalypse wouldn’t survive in those conditions. The military would make sure of that. If it does happen, it’ll happen in a large urban area. As for my research, I’m not silly enough to reveal what I found online, although if you’re smart, you probably already figured out my Google search. You also know to which lab I’m referring.
What do you think? Big city or small town? Do you have any other locations where a zombie apocalypse could start?
She doesn’t curse. She doesn’t swear. She doesn’t even own a gun. She’s the cutest redhead anyone’s ever seen. She’s also the epitome of American moral values. Who is she? She’s The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale, of course. And I’m proud to feature her as part of this week’s Women Who Wow Wednesday.
The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve dedicated a number of posts to some pretty violent female characters in movies. Other than Wonder Woman, most, if not all, have thrown a knife or fired a gun, beaten the crap out of their enemy, or jettisoned them into space. In a zombie apocalypse, those are the women who I’d love to have fight alongside me.
But Dorothy Gale? Sweet little Dorothy? How could she ever take on the undead?
Let’s take a look at what we got. She grew up on a farm. Not a small feat for a young girl, you know. She’s probably seen things done to animals that’d make a billy goat puke. Like rabbits skinned, chickens defeathered, turkeys beheaded, and the family pig, which I don’t think its name was Wilbur, fattened up for months until it reached implosion weight. Then with tears flooding her face, seen it slaughtered in the cool of the day.
So yeah, Dorothy grew up on a farm. She’s seen things.
The Cowardly Lion
Okay, so she’s got a tough stomach, but is she strong? I would say so. How else could one explain the absolute fear that gripped the Tin Man and Scarecrow when The Lion showed up? Dorothy stood her ground, though. She didn’t run away. She didn’t cry. Nooo, no. She walked right up to the snarling beast and smacked it across the mouth. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” She snapped, and she stared him down, she did.
Yes, but I can still hear the doubters. She couldn’t hurt an ant, I hear. She’s as gentle as a rose. She’d help a butterfly caught in a web.
Oh, yeah?
She dropped a house. On a witch. Not any ordinary witch, mind you. On THE Wicked Witch of the East. The most fearsome witch of the eastern hemisphere. And then she lied about it. When confronted by The Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy looked her straight in the eye and lied.
The Wicked Witch of the West
“Who killed my sister?” the Wicked Witch of the West asked. “Who killed the Witch of the East? Was it you?”
“No, no.” Dorothy said. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to kill anybody.”
“Well, my little pretty, I can cause accidents, too!”
Oh, really. Was that a threat?
Dorothy didn’t take too kindly to those words. No one threatens Dorothy Gale and gets away with it. Especially some cheap floozy who picks her clothes from the leftover Halloween bins at Wal-Mart. No way. From that moment on, the Wicked Witch of the West was on Dorothy’s hit list.
The Wicked Witch Melting
Once the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion and her sidekick Toto had the castle surrounded, Dorothy moved in for the kill. She executed her vindictive plan against the witch by drawing in the winged monkeys to the center of the tower. This would ensure she had witnesses, causing no one to doubt her supremacy. Then, in front of all the captains of the monkey army, she melted the witch. And like the coldhearted killer she was, she stood by watching the witch writhe in agony.
She even went so far as to get rid of the Wizard, cutting him loose in a balloon heading for Kansas.
Oh, yeah. I want Dorothy on my team. If anyone can vanquish the undead in a zombie apocalypse it would be Dorothy.
There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.
Have you seen The Wizard of Oz? If not, have you ever wondered what the movie or the books are about?
Welcome to Monday Mayhem. This is when I delve into the post-apocalyptic madness called the Zombie Apocalypse (a.k.a “The Future”), and give you my take on what life would be like if we as a human race would allow it to happen. Yes, for some of us it may be fictional, but for others…it’s already a reality. Have you been to Las Vegas lately?
In the movie I Am Legend, Will Smith’s character Robert Neville lives alone in a deserted city to fend for a cure to the dratted virus that annihilated humanity. If you haven’t seen the movie, I’d suggest you stop reading ‘cause I may throw in a spoiler or two.
From this point on.
Now.
*spoiler alert!!!*
The thing about the virus that consumed humanity is that scientists engineered it to cure cancer. Yeah, that’s somewhat credible to happen today. No really. In the movie, scientists believed that if they could unleash a biological weapon to destroy cancer cells, they could allow the body to repair itself, eliminating the uncertainty that is happening with today’s methods—and the costs. Unfortunately, it pretty much wipes out all humanity and leaves those who survived, famished zombies.
What I found interesting in the film is when everything falls apart in New York City— why is it New York City always takes the brunt of these end-of-days movie scenarios? (ie. Godzilla, Independence Day, etc.)—the military goes ahead and destroys all the bridges to the island to prevent the infected from escaping. If anyone’s seen The Dark Knight Rises, Bane uses the police to execute a similar strategy to contain the population in Gotham City. Now, this approach as logical as it may seem credible, doesn’t prevent the spread, since the virus crests to become airborne. Once this happens, to put in a cliché, all bets are off.
Thus the creation of the zombies, or rather, the Dark Seekers. Here is a quote from the movie to put the statistics into perspective:
“Seven billion people on Earth when the infection hit. KV had a 90% kill rate, that’s 5.4 billion people dead. Crashed and bled out. Dead. Less than 1% immunity. That left 12 million healthy people, like you, me, and Ethan. The other 588 million turned into your Dark Seekers. And then they got hungry, and they killed and fed on everybody. Everybody!”
*end of spoiler alert*
Yup, quite a future.
Well, this coming Friday, December 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar ends. Some have gone so far as to say it will be the end of the world. I actually have it written in my Outlook as an event—End of the World. Heck, I don’t want to miss it if it’s going to happen. No way. I’m just wondering how it will happen.
Will it be a virus? Maybe an invasion from another planet. Or perhaps a Great Tribulation as forecasted in the bible.
No one knows. But you can be sure of one thing: If we’re still around next Monday, I’ll bring you another installment of Monday Mayhem. That is, if the internet is still up and running…
What do you think? Do you think humanity is on the road to a Dark Seeker invasion? Or will it be business as usual this coming Friday? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Looking to God 