TWD, Survival Rule Of The Week: The rules are there for a reason

Surviving a zombie apocalypse will be all about following rules, and, as Magna learned in this week’s The Walking Dead, those rules will exist for a reason.

If you’ve been following my weekly articles long enough, I’m sure you may think a few of my rules seem a little silly, out of place, or utterly senseless. Well, rest assured, if I’ve made a rule for the zombie apocalypse, it’s because I had a reason to make it.

No rule that I (Or anyone else, I imagine) has made for the zombie apocalypse happened by accident. They were created because I thought about a whole bunch of situations you may encounter, and the need to be ready for whatever possible scenarios that could happen.

So, this week, I’ve decided to focus not so much on a specific rule, but, why The Rules (Be they mine or another groups’) exist in the first place, because, as I see it, once you know why a rule exists, you can start to truly grasp it.

First thing’s first: In a zombie apocalypse, security is paramount. Whether it’s the living or the dead, there will always be something out to get you. This means that the means by a which a person or a group protects themselves is vital to them. It is the primary way they stay alive.

You may not like their security protocols, hell, even within a group, not all of its members may like their security protocols, but, if it keeps them off the radar of whatever’s trying to kill them, it’s worth doing.

You do what it takes to protect yourself and that which you care about.

Speaking of which, if a person or a group is not as friendly or as accommodating as you may like, chances are…it’s because they have something to protect.

Like what? Take a wild guess.

Honestly, if people have established some kind of functioning safe zone, or have been part of a group for a long time, or have (Perhaps even created) a family, you can bet dollars to donuts that they will do whatever they think it takes to protect them. That place or those people represent something for them. It may be the memory of the world before, it may be all the work and all the sacrifices they made to get respite from the apocalypse, it may be the future, but, whatever it is, they will protect it, and, frankly, strangers present a potential threat to what they’re protecting.

Why? Well, let’s not kid ourselves; Even now, we don’t know what everyone around us is thinking. We don’t know if this new person we met is someone we can trust or not, and we don’t want to find out the hard way.

This is a much bigger issue in a zombie apocalypse, where trusting the wrong person may not simply result in public embarrassment or the loss of a lot of money, but, the loss of one’s home, one’s family, one’s life. The wrong person in our world might screw you over; The wrong person in a zombie apocalypse will kill you.

So, if it takes some time for a person or a group to trust you, don’t take it too personally.

Lastly, if you find yourself being rubbed the wrong way by the rules of another person/group, even if the comfortableness of their circumstances might make the rules seem moot or even exclusionary, think long and hard about why they have those rules in the first place.

As in the normal world, just because someone looks to be in cozy circumstances, doesn’t mean their life’s perfect. No one leads a perfect life. Everyone has problems that you don’t see, and problems that they don’t let you see.

Furthermore, you don’t know what it took for that person/group to get to where they are now. You don’t know what they lost along the way, what they had to sacrifice just to reach the point they’re at. Before you judge how someone lives, or why they do what they do, you need to walk their path; Only then will you truly understand.

You will come upon a lot of different rules in the zombie apocalypse. Whether they’re yours, mine, or someone else’s entirely, you will run into them. Some of them will make perfect sense, others…not so much. Either way, these rules didn’t just appear out of nowhere.

If someone has rules in a zombie apocalypse, they’re there for a reason.

That’s why you follow them.

And that’s our survival rule of the week!! Hopefully, it’ll help you give you that mental edge that will prove so crucial once the dead start eating everyone.

If you like this and want to find out more rules to survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can get it on Kindle here and on iTunes here!