A Note Found In the Apocalypse
Like every good holiday special, this one's back from the dead...
You can’t breathe. You are running, sprinting down the main street. There are too many of them. Maybe the crowd will be thinner up that alley. You turn. The growling, snarling, shambling horde is waiting and they lunge for you, hungry for flesh. You scream. You know screaming makes it worse, but you can’t help yourself. Their fingers clutch at your clothes. Just in the nick of time there is a door. You might just reach it if... You tuck your shoulder and heave your way through the mindless mob. The door is stuck. You slam it once, twice, three times, and to your joy it opens on the fourth and you go tumbling through, jamming it behind you, the hands and fists scratching and banging in their blind hunger, trying to get through. The room is quiet. Furniture strewn, upended. Papers and files on the floor. Dust and dirt. A single piece of paper on a clean desk, a pen laid on one side, a baseball bat on the other. Curious, you pick up the note and read…
I don’t always get in fights with hordes of flesh-eating zombies, but when I do, I use a bat.
Forget everything you learned about the Walkers from the Walking Dead. Skulls don’t suddenly assume the consistency of a watermelon the moment a body shuffles off the mortal coil. Bone is bone, dead or alive, and bone is hard. Anything you stick into bone will probably stay there. It’s also REALLY HARD to penetrate to the brain, and if there’s anything helpful about binge watching your favorite undead gore fest, it’s that you HAVE TO DESTROY THE BRAIN! Don’t be a dumbass and make your last stand with a pocket knife. Don’t. Just don’t.
The other thing, don’t use guns unless you get to the “fuck it” stage of the shit show. Assuming you know how to handle guns, you have to have Deadshot aim to consistently destroy brains. If you can do that, great. One shot, one kill, on to the next Biter. But the reason guns are dumb is that guns are loud. The best zombie flicks factor that in to some extent. Loud noises attract more Shamblers, so you end up facing the law of diminishing returns. The one thing you can do to actually give yourself an edge with guns is to use a silencer, but who has one of those?
Oh, and the other epically bad problem with guns? They run out of ammo. Hand weapons don’t run out of ammo. And I maintain that the best way to engage in hand-do-hand combat with the Undead is with a club. A club is about smashing stuff, not penetrating bone, so you’ll never leave it behind in someone’s expired dome and have to go bare knuckle on their asses. All it takes is relatively minimal brain damage to take one of these Ghouls out. About what it would take to give a living brain a nasty concussion. Freshly dead brains have a bit more resilience than rotting dead brains, so if you’re getting tired, go for the real Rotters.
One final point of realism (and this is good news): your abdomen is more resilient than the Hollywood zombie industrial complex would have you believe. While having your intestines devoured while you’re still alive makes for good cinema, the fact of the matter is that no flesh and blood humanoid, dead or alive, has the ability to rip you open with their bare hands as though all that skin and muscle is made out of jello. So get swarmed with confidence! It will take those Empties much longer to kill you than Hollywood’s patently unscientific propaganda has brainwashed us into believing, unless one of their bites nicks an artery, in which case you will be issued your Undead Club membership card sooner than you’d hoped.
One final point about how to actually survive this shit show. The best strategy is to just GTFO. Run. Make tracks. Haul ass. Once it gets to the point of actually having to make a stand, your days, hours, and minutes before being devoured are numbered. And for God’s sake, don’t trip over shit. Watch where you’re going, okay? And if you do trip and fall, don’t roll over on your back and try to crab crawl away from the oncoming horde while screaming in terror. Stay focused, get your ass up, and resume your flight.
That’s it. That’s all I got. These are lessons me and my friends learned the hard way, one at a time, until I was the only one left. And, by the way, I shut myself in that closet behind the desk as I was expiring. I highly recommend you don’t open the door.
Good luck!
Well written!