Believe it or not, even as a big guy,
before the world all went to Hell, I did try to exercise. I would go up to the
track at my old high school, put my MP3 player on, and walk in the evenings
after the sun went down. And if I maintained a brisk pace, just walking, I could
clear a mile in 16 minutes which is 3.75 miles per hour. It basically broke
down to one lap around the track in 4 minutes, which is 100 yards every minute.
I would often time it using the length of songs on my MP3. So now, with that in
mind, let’s start breaking things down.
Let’s say that your average zombie
shuffles along at a pace that is slower than normal walking speed. Let’s say
that they are not hustling like they are chasing after someone like a human
being or a car. Since they are dead, let’s say that they walk at a speed that
is one quarter of a human being.
With their shuffling gait, let’s just
say that they cover a distance of one mile per hour. That’s it. That is all they can shuffle is
one mile per hour. But here is the kicker.
They will walk relentlessly for one mile an hour. Sunshine. Rain. Snow. Night.
Day. They don’t get tired. They don’t get winded. They shuffle endlessly. And
while these things are mindless, they also do not appear to be stupid.
What I mean by that is that when we
see these shambling hordes come shuffling through, we rarely see large group
walking through the cow pastures behind us or emerging out of the woods. They
come from the highways.
With no more cars traveling the
highways, you now have these wide open stretches that are easily traversed. Who
wants to trudge through the woods? Even a zom knows that is not exactly the
literal path of least resistance. So they don’t walk “as the crow flies.” They
are shambling along via the highways.
The Will Rogers turnpike is pretty
much a straight shot from my hometown of Adair to Tulsa. It also happens to be
49 miles. Which at one mile an hour clearly shows, from Adair, Tulsa is two
days walk for a zom.
If Adair, Oklahoma was the epicenter
of the outbreak (I know it wasn’t but I am making a point), a zom horde could
reach Dallas, Texas in 12 days. New York, New York in 54 days. Los Angeles,
California in 62 days.
Yes, granted, that is straight walking
with no distractions and no chasing after meat and using the best highways to get
them there. But note the date of this entry. This is Day 123. And that is with
Adair as the epicenter. Given the Twitter crashes and Facebook shut downs, I am
willing to be that the outbreak did not just occur here in Oklahoma. So what
does this mean?
I think everyone can agree that there
is no part of the United States that could be considered a safe haven at this
point. These things could have shambled from Washington State all the way to
the Florida Keys by now.
Is there a haven? A safe zone? Anywhere?
