A Note Found in the Apocalypse
Like every good holiday special, this one's back from the dead...
You are alone. You are running, sprinting down the main street. Your desperate breaths come in panicked gasps and spasms. They have sensed you, and the snarling growling horde is shambling towards you. They’re slow, but they’re too many. Maybe the swarm will be thinner up that alley. You turn. No luck. Another horde is waiting and they lunge, hungry for flesh. You scream. You know screaming makes it worse, but you can’t help yourself. Fingers clutch your clothes. Just in the nick of time, 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 tumble through, jamming it behind you, the hands and fists scratching and banging in their blind hunger.
The door won’t hold long. You’re in a dim hallway, and you wheel into the first room on your right and slam the door. Click the lock. Jam an old office chair under the handle. You turn and take a long breath, leaning against the wall.
The room is quiet. Dusty light slants in from a single window. Office furniture strewn, upended. Files on the floor. A single piece of paper on an old desk, a pen laid on the right side, a gory baseball bat on the left. Crusts of dried blood emblazon the stationary. Words scribbled in a shaky hand. You pick up the note and read…
Dear survivor,
I don’t always get in fights with hordes of flesh-eating zombies, but when I do, I use a club.
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 Dead One. 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 ultimately you’re just digging yourself in deeper with every shot. A silencer could help a little, 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. I maintain that the best way to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the Empties 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 are more resilient 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 by the Living Dead 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 Biters 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.
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 my friends and I learned the hard way, one at a time, until I, too, acquired a fatal necro-nibble on the neck. The fever is taking me. To be sure to leave you undisturbed as you read this, I shut myself in that closet behind the desk as I was expiring. I highly recommend you don’t open the door.
Good luck!
Sincerely,
Someone Who Didn’t Make It