Seanbaby
If you have any kind of active fantasy life, you've got at least a vague idea of what you're going to do when society turns into zombies. Maybe you've picked a favorite weapon or a defendable location. People argue about the best zombie survival plans like it's a religion, and it sort of is, because unless something extremely unlikely happens, we will have wasted billions of hours on pointless speculation and planning.
This is not an article to debunk survival methods. I've read The Zombie Survival Guide, and if you like your chances of looting a karate shop and cutting down a horde of corpses with a 15-pound monk's spade, I'm happy that your stupidity will finally yield a spectacular death. After all, we're talking about a make-believe world, so you might as well be 
When it's you against a world of undead, you should probably get some help, right? You'll need a few partners to kill the zombies behind you or to guard the entrances while you scrounge for canned stew. You need a rotating watch so the rest can sleep, and someone has to watch over suppl- holy shit, look what just happened. I started talking about group survival, and one sentence later I'm already fussing about food rations and scheduling. Do you really want to spend the apocalypse checking your day planner?Nothing screws up a wasteland of shambling monsters like a group of human survivors. Every person who joins your rabble takes your exciting tale of action horror one step closer to psychological melodrama. The Walking Dead is almost entirely about human men flossing their teeth with one another's tongues. What happens is that when people form fruit loop society microcosms, they start to realize that they have to hang on to the only thing they have left: their humanity. You know why? Because when someone sits around thinking about crap like this too long, their thoughts fold in on themselves until their entire brain becomes a vagina.
Let's see if that's true by dealing with a common zombie situation. Say a female survivor is bitten. Of course, you can't shoot your friend in the head, no matter how psychopathic you think you'll be once civilization ends. So soon you're in a heated argument with your own soul and the other survivors about how to get rid of this zombie time bomb. And if I know zombie fiction, she's about to interrupt to say she's pregnant, just so you all know you're about to execute the very concept of hope itself. This kind of drama will repeat every single time someone steals a box of cookies or gets overtaken by a horde and left for dead. A few well-intentioned survivors can turn even the nicest apocalypse into a Dove Body Mist commercial.
You know who doesn't have to deal with that shit? The feral maniac living in the sewer and becoming one with the night. Basically, when the end of the world arrives, you have two choices: Spend it as Tarzan or spend it as Meryl Streep.
Society is collapsing, so you'd better get a gun quickly, right? Let's assume for a second you know how to use one well enough to aim at a reeking flood of corpses and shoot the parts that are faces. Now you're stuck with a couple of problems: Your noisy gun is calling more things than you kill, and given the nature of this zombie-horde problem, you will always have more enemies than bullets. But maybe you should stop fussing over all these tiny details. You're planning a zombie apocalypse, not the perfect wedding. Let's go get a gun.
Even if you're in an unfair apocalypse starring fast zombies, the one advantage you'll always have over the undead is your cleverness. Don't be tempted to use it, though. Don't launch fireworks to distract them. Don't train a dog to deliver your groceries. And if you form an elaborate plan to cover yourself in corpse juice to disguise yourself as a zombie, your last words are probably going to be "It's working! It's worAARRRGGHHHHH!!! Always remember that I died a stupid, smelly dipshit!"
Everyone with the world's most ordinary bookshelf knows that Sun Tzu said, "Those who use fire to assist their attacks are intelligent." Forget that. Intelligence is for the ancient Chinese. We're not trying to outmaneuver Cao Cao's archers in a wheat field. We're talking about zombies -- slow, moaning, American zombies, where the smarter you act, the shittier your apocalypse is going to be.
When the dead start reanimating, your first few words are mostly going to be shrieks. But after you catch your breath, you're going to be tempted to ask what could have caused it all. Was it mutated rabies? Was God cranky about gay marriage? Was a space meteor cranky about regular marriage? Oh, if only we could capture one of these ... these ... let's call them "bite-walking corpse monsters," we could learn from them! Understand them! Maybe find a cure!
If you're an ordinary kind of nerd, you've probably already picked a nice shopping center in which to safely wait out the zombie apocalypse. There are a couple of problems with that plan. First, your wildest post-apocalyptic fantasy involves you cowering in a mall? You deserve the second problem with your plan: the rapists who thought of coming to the mall shortly after you. The theme of every zombie film, book and TV show is that humans are the real monsters, because a doorknob will keep the undead away, but there is no escape from the evil in men's hearts. I wish that wasn't true, but I was outvoted when writers all agreed to be pussies.
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