The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Watch out for your friends

If the latest Walking Dead episode is anything to go by, in a zombie apocalypse you should watch out for your friends and WATCH OUT for your friends.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: People are social animals. We need other people around, we need friends; Without them, we go crazy.

This is especially true in a zombie apocalypse. There is no more stressful situation than trying to survive a world infested with millions of walking corpses trying to eat you, and it’s nice to have someone you like and trust watching your back.

With that in mind, and, after watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead, I figured I should dedicate this week to the value of having friends and watching out for them.

First things first: You have nothing without trust. If you and your friend(s) can’t trust one another, how can you expect to survive together? You can’t.

You need to know that you can trust the people you survive with and they, in turn, need to be able to know they can trust you.

If you can’t trust each other, things like fighting zombies, getting supplies, hell, even sleeping become a much more stressful thing, as neither of you knows whether or not the person/people they’re with will actually help them, or kill them. Seriously, would you be able to sleep in the zombie apocalypse if you didn’t trust the other people in your group? I doubt it.

The reason I bring all this up is because any group of survivors in a zombie apocalypse need to know that the people they’re surviving with will help them in a time of need. If your friend is being attacked by zombies or hostiles or…alligators, they need to know that you’ll be there to help them. We can’t always do it alone, and friends got to be ready to help each other out whenever one of them runs into trouble.

It goes beyond that, though. Even after time has passed or you’ve been separated by distance, you can’t just leave your friends to twist in the wind. If your friends are walking into a dangerous situation, you can’t just let them do it alone, you have to try to help them if you have the ability to do so.

Of course, that’s not the only meaning of the phrase “watch out for your friends”, now, is it?

Remember that whole “trust” thing I was talking about earlier? Yeah, well, the trick is: You need to be very careful who you give it to. You can’t just hand it out to everyone you come across because, well…not everyone is good.

Something else I’ve said before (And will say again) is: “The apocalypse brings out the worst of us…” meaning all the sketchy people will come out of the woodwork when society crumbles, and, if you’re not careful, you might wind up putting your trust in one of these sketchy people. If we go back to my earlier reference to fighting zombies, getting supplies, or sleeping, if you wind up trusting someone who isn’t trustworthy, they might just leave you to get bitten by a zombie, or kill you in your sleep, just to get the supplies the two of you collected.

I almost forgot! My earlier saying is incomplete, it’s actually: “The apocalypse brings out the worst of us, and, the worst in us”, meaning that, even people we know, even good people, can sometimes become bad from being exposed to the brutal, twisted, insane, and violent world the zombie apocalypse creates. Should you encounter someone you know in the apocalypse (Unless, obviously, you’ve already been surviving with them successfully for a while), until you know you can trust them, you should always keep them at arm’s length, because you don’t know what the apocalypse may have driven them to, or what dormant evils it brought out in them.

In a zombie apocalypse, you have to watch out for your friends and watch out for your friends.

This is why you follow…The Rules.

And that’s our Survival Rule Of The Week! Hopefully, you’ve gained a little insight into all the various things you’ll need to look out for. 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 also get it on iTunes here!