Fear The Walking Dead Survival Rule: Our Best Strength/Weakness

Those You Care About Can Become Weak Points Others Will Exploit.

As we would learn from the Fear season seven finale, Madison was willing to become part of P.A.D.R.E.’s kidnapping ring in the first place because they offered to help her locate Nick and Alicia if she agreed to kidnap a child for them.

Of course, this was bait for the trap. After Madison confirmed that she was willing to compromise her principles to be reunited with her children, P.A.D.R.E. knew they had leverage over her and kept dangling the carrot, telling her that (Ostensibly because searching Texas would be such an undertaking) simply one kidnapping wasn’t enough, and they needed her to do another. For an indeterminate amount of time, this was the nature of their relationship — Madison would do a job, they’d tell her they needed more, she’d go out and do another job, rinse and repeat — until, finally, P.A.D.R.E. agreed to search for Nick and Alicia, of course, by then, Madison was so disgusted with herself, she refused their offer.

This pattern is one more hostile survivors may seek to use on you in a zombie apocalypse if they think they have the means to do so. If you have spouses, family, children, whatever, that another group can get a hold of, or at the very least, convince you that they’ve gotten a hold of, they could use your concern to force you to do what they want.

Trying to counter this is tough. If some hostile(s) do have your loved ones captive, the best thing you can do is try to figure out a way to free them, but other than that, your best hope may be that you don’t know whether they have them or not. If they haven’t shown you proof of life, that may give you leeway to try to force them to reveal whether they have your loved ones or not, and if they can’t, you may have to start considering the possibility that they’re lying, and what you’ll do from there. I suppose your best option is to take precautions to ensure that any potential enemies don’t find or can’t reach the people you care about because, so long as they can’t do anything to them, they can’t manipulate you.