The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Surprises suck

2) SURPRISE! …Everything’s ground to halt.

Once places become the worst surprise party of all time, the list of invitees to that party will start growing exponentially, as everyone in that place, and everyone on every road heading into that place gets roped into it, by which I mean every bit of traffic on every highway, bridge, and tunnel heading into that city comes to a complete stop as it descends into chaos.

Now, to anyone who’s watched The Walking Dead (Or just about any bit of zombie media, honestly), or, frankly, anyone who’s every driven into a major city, traffic isn’t that much of a surprise, but, what will be a surprise is when you find yourself in a traffic jam that goes nowhere for hours. What will also be surprising is when, after several hours of not moving, people start getting out of their cars to see what the hold-up is. What will be even more surprising is when all those people start running down the highway, even past their cars, desperately trying to escape something up ahead, which you will discover is hundreds of dead people marching down the highway, eating everyone they can get their hands on.

You see, this is the “ambush” nature of a zombie apocalypse that I mentioned earlier: A zombie apocalypse could happen at any time, even when in a routine event like a traffic jam. The problem, of course, is that if you’re in one when the outbreak begins…you’re pretty well stuck.

This is tough. Most highways heading into major cities are flanked by noise-cancelling walls, dense forests, or, in the case of my home state of Massachusetts, swamps and walls made of pure granite, they’re also divided by concrete or steel barriers; These are designed to keep people from driving into oncoming traffic or other people’s homes, which, while a good thing, makes them virtual prisons if anything disastrous happens on them.

I guess the best thing I can think of is that you should make sure you have supplies in your car in case of emergencies and memorize the roads you drive on so that, if you’re stuck in a never-ending traffic jam, you can (Hopefully) get onto an off-ramp and try to get yourself back home before the source of said traffic jam comes looking for you.