Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Be mysterious

After last week’s Fear The Walking Dead, Logan knows more about Morgan than vice versa. That’s bad. In a zombie apocalypse, you gotta be mysterious.

Obviously, zombies will always be a threat in a zombie apocalypse. Obviously. However, people will, more often than not, prove more dangerous simply because they’re smarter, or, at least, they’re supposed to be.

If you’re going around announcing yourself to anyone, friendly or not, as far and as wide as you can, you’re going to open up a nasty can of worms for yourself sooner rather than later. Frankly, what you want to do is the opposite: You want potential enemies to know as little about you as you can so that, should you come to blows, they’re left at a disadvantage.

Yet, as we saw in last week’s episode of Fear The Walking Dead, Morgan and his convoy were doing the closest that they could muster in a zombie apocalypse to announcing themselves on television.

They made multiple video tapes presumably across Texas (And maybe even into Oklahoma and Arkansas, who knows?) letting everybody know almost everything about them.

Greeeeaaaaat idea. …Oh, wait, no.

Look, I get it: Morgan and company wanted to try to get back to something resembling the world before the outbreak. This is a great idea…in theory, but, in practice, it takes a little more than simply wanting cooperation to fix all the ills of a post-apocalyptic world.

You see, by making those tapes and spreading them around, yes, they allowed their message to reach a lot of people who might have otherwise avoided them, but, they were also giving Logan and his goon squad a great deal of information about that they may not want them having.

Now, there are ways you can mitigate this problem, especially if you are communicating with other members of your group over long distances via means that an enemy could eavesdrop on.

As Daniel showed in this week’s episode, by using coded messages, or coded language, you can, for all intents and purposes “speak without talking”, I.E. communicating a message to another person without your enemy being able to understand it, in Daniel’s case, it was music.

On a side note: This might be a good circumstance to utilize a foreign language. If you know that your enemy can’t speak a language that you and another member of your group speak, it would pay to use it if you know they’re listening in. It’s also a good excuse to learn another language.

And, that’s another thing: If you are communicating via radio or some other form of long-distance communication, you need to assume that potential enemies are listening. If you don’t know where they are, or even who they are, it would be wise to assume that enemies are listening, and act accordingly. This means no giving away where you are, where you’re headed, or who’s with you. Hostiles want to know that stuff? Let’em figure it out for themselves!

If you want a good example of why such precautions are necessary, look no further than what Logan’s henchman attempted to do to force Dwight to give up the location of the gas stash: He tried burning up all the messages Sherry left for him.

By revealing so much about his past on the tape, Dwight revealed a critical weakness that Logan and his team tried (And may try again) to exploit. Never let your enemy see you bleed.

In fact, you want the opposite, metaphorically: You want to know as much about your enemy as possible. You may not want a fight, but, rest assured, somewhere out there, someone wants a fight with you, and, you need to be as prepared for that fight as you possibly can be. You need to try to know everything you can about your enemy, so that, when that fight inevitably comes, you have some idea about how to beat them.

Fighting hostiles in a zombie apocalypse is a dangerous game, and it’s one you need to win. It requires discretion, cunning, stealth, and intelligence. You need to know as much about your enemy as possible, and give as little back. You need to know them like a book, and you need yourself to remain a mystery. That is how win.

And 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!