The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: A Cold, Cruel World

5) A Shovel

I don’t think shovels get nearly the sort of appreciation they deserve. They’re one of the more useful tools you can have and, when necessary, can be quite versatile…in a zombie apocalypse, anyway.

Now, I know that a shovel you use for dirt is not the same as a snow shovel, but having either is useful; Though, to be clear: Having a straight-up plastic shovel will do you diddly in a fight with a zombie if you need to be able to fight zombies with it, get one that’s got some metal in the blade.

Of course, a shovel is obviously more than just a weapon against the dead; it’s also used for, in this case, moving snow off the ground, which can actually be a far more serious matter than you might initially think.

You see, there’s another detail from my dad’s story about the poor people who died in their cars in the Blizzard of ’78: At least from what he’d heard, some of them died not from hypothermia but from asphyxiation. They suffocated on exhaust fumes inside their car.

How did this happen? Well, apparently, the snow was so thick on that hill that, while they ran their cars’ engines trying to stay warm, the snow blocked their tailpipes, sending the deadly fumes back into the cars. They never even knew what hit them.

Without road crews or rescuers, if your car gets stuck in a snowstorm, and the engine is the only thing keeping you warm, you’re going to need to make sure that this (As well as abject burial by snow) doesn’t happen to you. You will need to have a shovel, maybe several, if you have a large enough group, at the ready to keep your car from becoming entombed in snow, and, probably, to defend yourself from zombies who be drawn by the sound of your car’s engine.

The last thing you need in a zombie apocalypse is to get in a blizzard and realize that you have nothing to dig yourself out of the snow with besides your bare hands.