The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Be ready for war

While it IS a zombie apocalypse, as The Whisperers prove in The Walking Dead, people are among the biggest threats. Are you ready if someone were to attack?

In Metallica’s song “Don’t Tread On Me”, there’s a line that goes like this: “To secure peace is to prepare for war.” In no situation will you find this to be more true than a zombie apocalypse.

Don’t get me wrong, the dead will always be the primary threat, if, for no other reason, the fact that there will be so many of them; That said, while dead people will be the foremost threat, they may not, necessarily be the most dangerous. While the dead might attack you, they could very easily see your base and, so long as they don’t see or hear any sign of you, walk right by it. Living people, though? No such luck.

Hostile people will always be more intelligent than the dead — They will be able to use weapons, they will be able to strategize, Hell, they will be able to use the dead — and this, ultimately, makes them more dangerous.

In that little scenario I posited a minute ago, while the dead might ignore you, the living, even if you are as silent as a tomb, will investigate, even if they’re not hostile, and, if they are, they will almost certainly attack, sooner or later.

And, after a couple of days of wondering what I should focus on this week, and remembering where this latest season of The Walking Dead left off, that is what I’ve decided to make this week’s Survival Rule Of The Week about: Being ready for the living.

You see, even if you’ve been surviving for a long time in the apocalypse without running into hostiles, it doesn’t mean that will last forever. Sooner or later, hostiles will find you, and, this means that, you should always be ready for that day to come.

That readiness means a lot of things. First and foremost, it means looking at you, your group’s, and your base’s weaknesses and doing your best to fix them. If your walls are weak, reinforce them, if you only have one way in and one way out, make an emergency escape route, if anyone in your group isn’t ready, make them ready.

“How do you make them ready?” Start by getting them into shape. Next, make sure everyone in your group, everyone, knows how to fight with their bare hands, because, in a worst-case scenario, those are the only weapons you got. And then, make sure everyone in you group knows how to use any and all weapons you can get your hands on. The more ways you know how to defend yourself, the better you’ll be at defending yourself.

Being physically ready isn’t enough, though, you need to be ahead of the game; You need to know what your potential enemies might try to take advantage of, and be a step ahead of them.

Got a lot of wilderness around your base? You need to realize hostiles might exploit that for cover, and have scouts hiding there, waiting to catch them in the act.

On top of that, if you know hostiles are in the vicinity, you need to be able to set traps for them (And for the dead, while you’re at it). Anything that can slow them down, block them, or incapacitate them is something you should learn how to make and how to set so that, even if they do decide to attack you, they’ll learn pretty quickly that you and your group are more trouble than it’s worth.

Lastly, realize that, in a zombie apocalypse, there is every chance that whatever hostiles you may encounter are as bad as you might imagine them to be…or worse.

They could be total megalomaniacs, bent on controlling everyone around them, and destroying those they can’t bring to heel, they could be completely deranged, with some warped perception of who you are, who they are, and the righteousness of whatever nasty things they might be doing, or, they could be pure predators, out to take or consume anything (And I do mean “anything”) they find. The level of human depravity in desperate situations is unfathomable, and there’s few situations more desperate than the zombie apocalypse.

A zombie apocalypse will be dangerous, obviously because of the zombies, but, even more so because of the people. You can’t tell what kind of miscreants you may be faced with, but, rest assured, they will be out there, and, if you want to make sure you and your group survive any encounters with them, you need to prepare to fight them. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t met them yet, you need to be ready to fight them long before you do, or else, they’ll have an early advantage you may never recover from.

As Metallica so aptly put it: “To secure peace is to prepare for war.”

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 and do. 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 at Amazon here, on iTunes here!