Back in September, I cooked up this
plan that we tentatively called “the Bob Initiative” that had the potential to
keep us safe but could also make us look like demented serial killers… Allow me
to explain.
Do you know the legend of Jack of the
Lantern? In life, Jack was a sinister vagabond who tricked the Devil and made
Old Scratch promise to never take his soul. When he died, Jack was too evil to
go to Heaven and Satan met him at the gates of Hell refusing him entrance. So
Jack was condemned to wander through limbo, lighting his way through the
darkness with a small piece of hellfire that he kept in a hollowed out pumpkin.
On All Hallow’s Eve, when the veil between the land of the living and the land
of the dead was thinnest, Jack would push through once more into the land of
the living, looking for a place for eternal rest.
Families would place pumpkins carved
with faces on their doorsteps with candles inside them. Jack would see the
pumpkins and assume that some other restless spirit had already claimed the
house for themselves. It was a way to ward off the evil spirit known as Jack of
the Lantern. True story.
Now, I want you keep that story in the
back of your mind… And please understand, if taken out of context, what I am
about to tell you seems tremendously horrible. However, please note that we
have not descended down into madness quite yet. So, first of all…
Q: What do call a cow with no
legs?
A: Ground Beef.
If you don’t like that one…
Q: What do you call a dog with no
legs?
A: It doesn’t matter. He is not going
to come to you.
Funny? Absolutely. But within that
context, there is a real bona fide fact. A zombie with no arms and no legs is
not a threat unless you are close enough for them to bite you. Then a quick
removing of the jaw or teeth makes them about a .0001% of a threat. So, the
guys had an idea.
Armed and outfitted with protective
gear, they isolated a single zom and lured them into the “kill box.” Once
there, the zom was beaten to the ground and stunned through clubbing blows.
Remember our earlier articles. Zoms are easy to knock down because of their
poor balance and then they are easier to attack when prone. So, our crew
wrapped the head in our industrial shrink wrap (they don’t suffocate because
they don’t breathe) and their arms and legs were then hacked off by the
collection of wood axes that we swiped from ACE Hardware. And then just for
good measure, we pulled an Edward Norton in American
History X and curb stomped his punk ass.
So you have this armless, legless,
jawless zom. The first one we named Bob. (Yes, as in “up and down in the
water.”) Bob was then attached to a T-Post via the shrink wrap, taken out to
the far corner of our perimeter, and staked into the ground.
He continues to thrash about, moan and
wail and gnash his teeth (kinda)… but he isn’t going anywhere. Once we
retreated back to safety, we started watching Bob through binoculars. With no
food source in Bob’s perceptive range, eventually he settled down and just kept
looking around for something – anything – to come into his range.
So, the idea behind the concept is
that if there are already zoms in the area, then new zoms coming into the area
will assume that any food has already been consumed and they will shuffle and
shamble off somewhere else. However, some believe that by staking zoms outside
our building, it could just draw more in to our area. I guess at this point
that might not be much of an issue because we could make more Bobs out of them.
The question is if a large shamble of zoms comes through, say they are just
walking down the highway as we have seen them do, will they stop and take more
of a notice because we have zoms staked outside. Would we be better off just
continuing to make like a hole in the world, hunkering down, and hiding if and
when they come past?
The argument is that we should try it
and if the Bobs do complicate things, we can always snipe them from our rooftop
position and go back to a square one.
But please, if you attempt this, do
not get lulled into a false sense of security. One bite is all it takes.
Remember that.
