The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Know your enemy

While it’s important to know how the living might threaten you in a zombie apocalypse, you MUST know your biggest enemy…is the walking dead.

People are always going to be a major threat to your life in a zombie apocalypse, and you need to know the many ways they could be that threat, however, what do you think is going to be the largest threat to your survival?

What will outnumber the living probably a hundred thousand to one?

What is the apocalypse named after?!

…Oh, yeah, zombies, and you need to know about them, too. Since I devoted so much of last week on what you need to watch out for from people, I thought this week I’d focus on learning about the dead, so you aren’t just scrambling once they start acting weird and, you know, eating people.

Okay, let’s get the obvious out of the way first: To survive a zombie apocalypse, you need to know your enemy, as best you can. The more you know about zombies, the better equipped you’ll be to fight them.

How do you do this? Easy, watch them.

You can learn a lot by watching the dead, from a safe distance, of course. Whenever you get a chance, if you find a group of zombies, just watch what they do for a while (How they move, when they move, what they eat, what they don’t eat, etc.); every little detail you pick up could be something that saves your life one day.

For example, pay attention to how an individual zombie attacks; Sure, we know that their greatest strength is their numbers (Don’t ever underestimate that, by the way), but, one of them can be just as lethal as a thousand of them.

You may know that a thousand zombies might push through a door, but, do you know how strong one zombie might be when it tries to bite you? That one zombie may not have the ability to rely on adrenaline or consciously try to use all their muscles for one task, but, they also don’t have restraint, meaning they could unleash a surprising amount of strength when they lunge for your throat, and you’re forced to try to push them off of you.

Something else you should consider when learning about the dead: How they hunt. Seeing as how the reason they’re such a threat in the first place is the fact they eat people, it would pay to find out how, exactly, they go about doing it.

The first thing I would suggest is to assume that they can see you and avoid being in areas where it be easy for them to do so, like out in the open or under street lights, things like that; I generally don’t like assuming, but, in this case, I think it’s fine.

Next, while their ability to see you is pretty safe to assume, until we encounter them, we don’t know how well or even if they can hear us; I wouldn’t begrudge you assuming that they can, but, even making that assumption, you definitely should try to figure out just how well they can hear, unless you enjoy finding out much too late that the dead can hear you talking from five miles away.

Lastly, I guess, now that I think about it, there is one more thing I think is safe to assume is that zombie blood and/or guts are bad for you. Remember, zombies are rotting human corpses, chances are good that, even they weren’t zombies, their blood would be toxic to the rest of us, so, assume that getting any of it in open wounds, your eyes, nose, or mouth, or on/in anything you eat or drink will be extremely bad for your health.

You may be able to use zombie cloaks to mask your scent, and by all means, experiment with it, but, do so with extreme caution: You don’t want to be careless and, while trying to sneak by undetected, make yourself fatally ill.

Now, when it comes to how you learn about the dead, I have one simple rule: Do not keep zombies. It is a bad idea.

Why (For those who might ask)? Because one screw up, one lapse in judgment, can get you, or whoever is keeping the dead penned up, bitten or killed outright. It is a potential risk that you simply don’t need, especially if you have a sturdy perimeter fence from behind which to safely observe them.

Another bit of advice I will give you is this: I wouldn’t trust someone who insisted on keeping zombies, if I were you, either.

Best-case scenario, it indicates very poor judgment on the part of whoever is doing it, ignoring the obvious risk involved, but, in a worst-case scenario, it indicates you have someone who might just decide the best way to find out about the dead is to feed someone to one of them, and see what happens; Such a person is a ticking time bomb.

Most of what you can glean from the dead can be done without having a macabre zoo of corpses, so, don’t risk becoming infected just to learn things you could learn from a distance.

Knowledge is power in a zombie apocalypse. The more you know, the better chance you can survive.

This is why you follow…The Rules.

And that’s our Survival Rule Of The Week! 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!