The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: How to stay alive

The Walking Dead has shown us just how many ways you can die in a zombie apocalypse. This week, I want to show you the many ways you can stay alive.

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks telling you all the things that can kill you in a zombie apocalypse, so, for a change of pace, let’s spend this week focusing on avoiding those things that can kill you, or, at the very least, avoid being killed by them.

With so many things out to get you, it’s tough to know where to start, but, I can tell you where I’d start: With a plan.

You need to know what you’re doing at any one time in order to stay alive, by that I mean, if and whenever possible, you need to have an idea of what you’re doing, how you’re going to do it, and how long it should take you to do it.

I know you can’t always help it, but, if the best idea you have is to just wing it in every situation…you’ll get killed before you get many chances to try.

In addition to that, since it’s really easy for plans to get screwed up on you, you need to have a back up plan, maybe several, so that, should your original plan go sideways, you already have an idea of what you’re going to do to get whatever you wanted to be done accomplished without losing anyone or getting bitten yourself.

Right up there with having a plan, you need to familiarize yourself with your environment: You need to know where your destination is relative to where you are, how to get there and, more importantly, how to get out.

Why is this important? Well, every second that you don’t know where you are is another second the dead have to surround you and, ultimately, eat you. You can easily doom yourself if you carelessly stumble into a dead end. If you already know where the dead ends are, you can know not to get trapped in them.

Of course, sometimes, running away from a threat simply isn’t an option, sometimes, the only way to deal with a threat is to fight it. On some level, we all have an instinct to defend ourselves, but, whether it’s against zombies or hostiles, we need to actually know how to defend ourselves, specifically, with the tool God gave us: Our bodies. We need to know how to fight with our hands, our feet, our knees, our elbows, Hell, even our heads, if necessary; Whatever it takes to keep ourselves alive.

While we may need to fight with our hands in a zombie apocalypse, ideally, we want to fight them from a distance, and one of the best weapons to do that with is a gun.

With this in mind, if you want to survive potential encounters with the dead, it pays to know how to properly use and maintain a gun. Your gun will be your first line of defense against the dead; You need to know everything about it, from how to shoot it to how to clean it. You may not think it, but, sometimes, something as simple as not cleaning your gun properly can prove fatal, and it’s in your best interest to minimize things that can kill you.

And, if you fail to clean your gun, and it becomes unusable, or a zombie gets too close to use it, you need something to defend yourself with, and, you need to know how to use it.

While you have the opportunity, you should learn how to use a good sidearm — A hatchet, a bowie knife, something — so that, in a tight situation, you have the means of defending yourself from zombies when you have nothing else.

This is, of course, how one deals with threats they can see; As I mentioned last week, not all threats in a zombie apocalypse are ones you can see, let’s take, for example, contaminated water.

If you’re getting your water from a well, river, or lake, you would be wise to check that source of water as carefully as you can, because you do not want to learn too late that your drinking water was a zombie’s bathtub.

Speaking of water, you’d also be smart to get rid of any standing water near your base…just in case mosquitoes can carry the zombie virus, too.

Water is the most important thing we can put in our bodies, naturally; But, we can’t forget the fact we also need food.

Food, however, may not be the easiest or most consistent thing to find in a zombie apocalypse: Stores could get looted or destroyed, as could any residential houses you might otherwise get food from.

With the possibility of readily finding food a crapshoot, you need to know how to be able to grow or raise your own. You can easily learn how to grow certain fruits or vegetables that are adaptable to your environment, as well as how to preserve or pickle whatever you don’t immediately eat. Similarly, depending on where you live, you can probably learn how to raise things like chickens or pigs (Which are fairly easy to find wild in parts of the world) from local farmers, as well as how to smoke or preserve excess meat. You never know when food may be in short supply, so any knowledge that helps you provide yourself with food is vital.

Lastly (For now) but, certainly not least is where you live in a zombie apocalypse. Before a zombie even gets the chance to bite us, exposure to the elements can cause us hypothermia, dehydration, frostbite, and myriad other things which can kill us just as dead as zombies.

Having a solid base not only keeps the dead away from you, but, it keeps you from sleeping in the pouring rain, freezing temperatures, blistering sunlight and heat, and, while the dead may not be around all day, the elements will be; Given enough time…they’ll kill you.

So, perhaps more so than anything else, making sure you have a solid, well-protected place to sleep is essential to ensure that when you go to sleep…you’ll actually wake up.

And that’s our Survival Rule Of The Week! Hopefully, you’ve learned a how to keep yourself alive. 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!