Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Little Things Get You
By Liam O'Leary
1) Bugs, Spiders, Scorpions, and Ticks
I don’t know where those of you reading this are from, but I’m from Massachusetts, and just like most people from eastern New England, I’ve gone on quick trips into New Hampshire from time to time at various points in my life.
On one trip into the Granite State in college, my friend’s car broke down, and we were stuck on the road for a couple of hours, waiting for a tow. While waiting, nature called, and I had to take a few seconds to answer. I stepped into the grass along the side of the highway, did what I had to do, and went back to the car, but before I got back, I took a second to look down at my legs and what did I find crawling on them? A deer tick.
Do you know what deer ticks carry? Lyme disease. Lyme disease is a nasty little disease that, if left untreated, can cause irregular heartbeat, inflammation of the brain, and, ultimately, death. All in all, not something you want to catch.
Why is this important? Well, firstly, sticking with my “Little Things” theme this week, deer ticks are tiny, so tiny, in fact, that you can’t even feel them moving on you; it was only because I was worried about them in the first place that I even thought to look down and check. If I’d been a little more lax, I might not have found out about it until it bit me and infected me with its awful calling card.
And secondly, ticks are just one of a collection of (mostly) small invertebrates that pack a nasty sting or bite, which, while a nuisance (Or perhaps even worse) under normal circumstances, become disastrous in a zombie apocalypse since that wouldn’t be “normal circumstances,” now, would it?
How would you get antidotes for spider bites or scorpion stings in a zombie apocalypse when hospitals would be overrun, and the equipment used to make or keep such antidotes wouldn’t be working? Do you see the problem here?
The best thing you can do is get books that identify all the bugs, centipedes, arachnids, and other arthropods where you live or where you might expect to reasonably go. Next, make sure you have some good bug spray or traps so that you can kill off as many of them as possible, and finally, if there are certain kinds of environments the creatures in question like, take steps to get rid of those, too, so that you minimize your chances of run-ins with these potentially fatal creatures as much as possible.