The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Two Sides Of Trust

Tales of the Walking Dead spinoff series

To survive against The Walking Dead, you need some distrust of the living. 

While Brooke and, apparently, everyone else on the riverboat saw nothing wrong with Billy The Bartender, there was one person who didn’t think he was all he was cracked up to be, one person who thought they should have been more cautious around him. That person, of course, was Dee.

And she was right.

Dee might not have been a detective, but it didn’t take long for her to figure out there was something fishy about how one bulb on the boat’s perimeter lights started blinking after Billy messed with it…after it had already been fixed it. She knew something was up and so quickly shut off the boat’s lights, hoping to interrupt any messages being sent out to any marauders who might have been waiting just out of sight. When she confronted him, he fled, earning Dee Brooke’s ire, but, ultimately being vindicated when Billy returned with his pirates to try to take over the ship, a scheme Dee disrupted, leading to the pirates’ deaths.

The point here is that, as weird as it is to say, as much as you need trust in a zombie apocalypse, you also need distrust.

Again, it’s weird, but hear me out: Because so many people in the apocalypse will want to just take what you have, or worse, you need to at least be a little distrusting of people. You need to be willing to question the people you meet, to watch them (Surreptitiously, if need be), to keep track of their movements, their activities, and what happens or is left behind after they go somewhere. If you’re diligent and patient, you will be able to ensure that the people you keep around are there because they don’t just want to pillage and plunder but actually want to survive alongside you. It is only by having a healthy distrust that you can effectively weed out the infiltrators and predators threatening to destroy you from within.