I know this sounds strange but when
you know what you are dealing with zombies are pretty easy to defend against.
If you can get to the second floor of a structure and can effectively barricade
or destroy the stairs, you are safe. Defending against them is easy. Outlasting
them is where things get difficult.
Once you are on that second floor or
the twenty-second, do you have water? Do you have food? Can you outlast them?
We have established that zoms will not stop. They will lose interest. If you
enter into a twenty-story high rise, a zom will not stay banging on the first
floor door. They go off hunting like anything else. But it comes down to how
long you can outlast them. That is how we have survived as long we have. We
were lucky. The major metropolises are gone. From the sounds of things, they
were overrun before they even knew what hit them. Before people could figure
out what they were dealing with, the zoms had grabbed their foothold and the
ranks were swelling “at a geometric rate.”
But for those that saw news reports or
lived out in the rural areas, they had time to prepare, hunker down, load the
shotgun shells, and defend themselves. Those that have not been overrun were
either lucky, well-prepared or both. But not all people are going to be lucky
enough to find themselves barricaded behind a couple thousand pounds of pig
iron inside a grocery store.
Eventually, that food is going to run
out and when people get hungry, they get desperate. Some might just curl up and
die. But if they do, we won’t see those people. They will have just slunk off
into a hole and shuffled off the mortal coil. Others will pull a Ving Rhames
and say, “There are some things worse than death.”
And that is when they venture outside,
looking for supplies, security, a stronghold, just like we saw with Wes and
Kyndall. We need to prepare a true contingency plan for when these people show
up. Because I believe they will. And not all of them are going to be as
magnanimous as the Reyes siblings. Imagine a mother who’s seven year old really
needs an albuterol inhaler. Imagine a father who needs antiseptic for a wound
sustained by his child. Imagine a teenager who hasn’t had a solid meal in a
week.
We have inhalers, both from the
pharmacy and that OTC Primatine Mist stuff. We have bottles and bottles of
peroxide and alcohol just sitting on the shelves. We have food. Lots of food.
Now, I am not saying that we should hang out the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet signs.
But we have yet to encounter the Beyond
Thunderdome warlords rolling around in off road vehicles.
I am not saying that the world couldn’t
degenerate into that but for now, I think we all need to hold onto our
humanity. We have to. How many speeches have we seen in movies where the hero
rallies the troops against the army of machines or where the noble knight must
slay the mighty dragon but they turn to look at the leading lady and ask, “But
at what cost? … What cost?”
We cannot be like that. We need to help the people
that come to us for help but we also have to be protective of our group. We
need contingency plans in place for if and when it does happen…
