WARNING: I do not abdicate nor
recommend anything that we are going to be talking about in this article.
I don’t know if you want to chalk it
up to the impetuousness of youth or not but Kanen Kraig is adamantly convinced
that he can walk amongst the zombies. Kanen is our resident extreme sports guy.
Whether it is doing motocross or riding around on four wheelers, if it is
motorized Kanen loves to ride it. Getting his dirt bike and his motocross gear
was one of his first priorities when we started doing sortie runs.
I will say this. Whatever you call it,
that BMX armor that he wears is pretty resilient. Obvious that vacu-formed
plastic isn’t going to do jack squat against a bullet. This stuff is not body
armor. But I cannot argue with Kanen’s logic that the stuff is strong enough to
resist bites. He has this theory that if he straps on his armor, wears enough leather,
and wears his helmet, he is essentially bite proof.
I remember watching these nature
documentary shows where scuba divers wear chain mail to stop shark bites.
Divers who have been bit while wearing the armor describe it as tremendous
pressure but the teeth cannot sink in.
All day he has been working on this
zombie suit that he is fortifying with duct tape. I know it sounds crazy but he
is pretty convinced that this stuff would hold up. I have asked him how this
stuff would hold up against a horde.
He has combated me with my own logic.
From the beginning, I felt the roll up doors to the back room and the produce
was secure because we would block them off with the pig iron that is our
forklift. My theory was that no amount of zoms could lay hands on the limited
surface area of the door to push the door in.
Kanen believes that not enough zombies
could surround him enough to hold him back and break through his armor. Think
about it, even if you are surrounded by 100 zombies, it is not like 100 zombie mouths
are biting at you simultaneously. There is not enough “surface area.” So even
surrounded by 100 zombies, at the most, you only have enough room for five or
six to surround you and make contact. And if their bites are slipping and
sliding off the duct tape, all you have to do is keep your feet churning and
keep moving.
His theory is that if he seals off
enough of the armor so there is nowhere for a zom to hook fingers in, he feels
he would be okay. It is a solid argument. I am really finding it hard to
disagree with him. Certainly, the guy armored up with a helmet, BMX armor and a
suit made out of duct tape is going to be more protected and therefore safer
than Streaker Joe out there wandering the wilds buck naked.
But this is the thing that we have been
stressing from the beginning. In this world, there is no such thing as “safe.”
There is “safer” but there is no safe. I just hope he understands that. I hope
you all understand that.
