Open Up The Door, We'll All Come Inside

I shopped at Costco for the first time a few weeks ago, and the duration of my visit to the store was consumed by considerations of how to fortify it in the extremely likely event of a zombie apocalypse.*

Costco is a bulk retailer, requiring a membership fee for the privilege of shopping there**. It is particularly notable for the sheer quantity and diversity of products it has for sale. A survivor trapped in a Costco would die of old age before starving for death - a single pallet of foodstuffs could provide basic nourishment for a year (though some diversity of diet would be required to avoid serious malnutrition) and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such pallets in a given location at a given time. Hundreds of man-years of food is nothing to scoff at in a Class III scenario.

But what happens when you get bored of eating until you die? Costco also sells tools and some materials, and all sorts of useful things could be scavenged from the broad array of consumer products. Some locations sell alcohol, valuable both as a disinfectant and as a trade good.

Architecturally, the building has a lot going for it. It's essentially a warehouse, with heavy doors, concrete walls, and no windows, except for skylights. With proper preparation, you could turn a Costco into a veritable bunker.

However, this is the first hitch. The size of the building is in some ways a weakness. A single person, or even a small group, would have no way to effectively patrol the perimeter. This is not a problem where zombies are concerned, so long as all entrances are properly sealed and secured, but zombies are not the only threat one must face. A hungry human interloper would not be deterred by a simple locked door. And remember those skylights?

The warehouse-like architecture is also a disadvantage in that it offers little in the way of a second line of defense. The majority of the floor space is open and contiguous. When (not if) the outer perimeter is breached, the prepared defender will have ready a fallback location, but the design of the building offers few options. This shortcoming is not insurmountable; one could certainly construct a secondary perimeter from available materials (pallets, shelving, sofa cushions, etc.) or find an office or back room. The local Costco offers a walled-off section refrigerated for fresh produce; perhaps this will serve. But this leads us into the next issue...

Costco has a substantial quantity of fresh produce - meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables. All of this requires constant refrigeration, and we cannot assume that this will be readily available during an outbreak. Within a few days, fresh food will go from being an asset to a liability, presenting serious health concerns. Produce could be quarantined, but this represents a massive undertaking, the feasibility of which depends on available manpower and machinery. It must be done if the location is to be considered seriously as a long-term location, but even then, your fortress will become quite rank in short order.

Costco offers a wide variety of retail products; unfortunately, Costco shoppers have exhibited little demand for weaponry in bulk, and so the supply is likewise limited. Weapons must be improvised from tools; it is unlikely to find anything more effective than a hammer or shovel.

But these issues are seemingly minor. You've secured the perimeter, and established a secondary line of defense. You've eaten what you can of the fresh food and quarantined the rest. You've scavenged for improvised weapons, and are now safe and secure in your fortress until all this zombie nonsense blows over and you can go back to shopping at Costco instead of living there. Right?

WRONG, you stupid wrong idiot dummy. You'd be better off locked in your house with a can of beans.

Retail locations are, by definition, chosen to be accessible. A Class III outbreak might wreak havoc with the commute, but you'll still be in a place chosen specifically so that people could get to it. And get to it they will. There's plenty of precedent for this - retail locations like Costco are often the primary target of looters during real world catastrophes. In an outbreak with no end in sight, the complications are amplified. You can fight off the undead, but could you fight off a starving mother and her children? (Hopefully, the answer is "yes"... but would you?) How about a well-organized, well-armed militia?

At best, your group will be enlarged substantially. A thousand man-years of food seems like a lot of food... for one person. How many can you handle before you simply run out? Will you be able to handle disputes? The likelihood of a dangerous conflict increases factorially with population.

At worst, you'll be killed for a can of peas.

Somewhere in the middle, there's the very real possibility that your defenses will be overrun by rude houseguests who won't close the door behind them, and who will have little consideration for your personal notions of how much is appropriate for a guest to eat.

When considering the viability of any location as a defense, consider the following question: Who else would want to go here?

If the answer is "anyone and everyone", just keep moving. A survivable location should be unappealing to anyone who doesn't think of it as home. If you think that it's a good idea to hole up at Costco, that probably means that everyone else thinks so, too.

So, Costco is a bit of a trap, but don't let that dissuade you from sending out parties from your real secure location to raid the shelves. They have these giant things of fruit snacks for like $10. Beware, however, of those who failed to heed my sage advice - they'll be waiting for you in Aisle 10 with a shotgun.

*For the purposes of this discussion, consider an outbreak of Class III or larger.
**Most of these tactical conclusions can be applied to other general retailers. (Wal-Mart, Kroger's, etc.)

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I don't see you laughing

All We Want To Do Is Eat Your Brains, Pt. 2
We're At An Impasse Here, Maybe We Should Compromise

It's been several months since I last wrote on the subject of zombies, and I'll admit that this is mainly because I found the task so daunting that I nearly gave it up. The subject is vast, and very near to my heart; I didn't want to screw it up. I was spurred into action, however, by the novel Dead in the West, by Joe Lansdale. The book is billed as a "zombie western", and is meant as an homage to the classic pulps of days gone by, but falls into the same trap that snared Rodriguez' Planet Terror; namely, they manage to capture just how terrible pulps were. The book isn't about zombies, per se. It focuses more on the main character, "a gun toting preacher man who came to Mud Creek to escape his past. He has lost his faith in the Lord and his only solace is the whisky (sic) bottle." This quote is from the dust jacket, and it contains more character development than the entire book.

The zombies aren't even particularly interesting ones; they're magical in nature, and so the resolution of the conflict comes with a heaping dose of deus ex machina. And yet, this book kept me up until three in the morning, and after I finished I got up and made sure that my door was locked and I had weapons readily accessible. Why is it that zombies do this to me?

First of all, zombies (or at least the zombies under consideration in this case) are unequivocally evil. You don't need to feel bad when you kill them. You don't need to capture them and reform them (as you would with, say, Nazis), and there's no sense of killing something that, while unequivocally evil, has the potential to be good (like vampires). There does not exist a more clear-cut example of "kill or be killed" than with a zombie. Killing zombies is not only Not Evil; it almost certainly falls under the purvey of Good, since by killing a zombie you are protecting not only yourself but others. (Details are, of course, situational.) This isn't to say that moral conflicts don't exist during a zombie apocalypse. I still don't have a good answer to the question of what you do when a stranger comes, begging for help, to the door of your hideout. However, one matter will always be perfectly clear. Zombies will never be anything more than mindless, soulless automata.

Which brings me to my second point: Zombies are mindless. Thus, any conflict with zombies pits their weakness against humanity's biggest strength - our endless adaptability. If one is battling some other form of evil, like Communists, one must engage in a constant battle of wits, fighting to outsmart them while simultaneously evading the grasp of their Communist wiles. Zombies, on the other hand, are perfectly straightforward. Fighting them has more in common with surviving a natural disaster or disease than fighting a war.

However, there is one key difference. You don't fight an earthquake, you survive it, if you're lucky. Poverty, hunger, all are greater evils today than zombies, but you can't go out and kill poverty with a shotgun. (If you do, you're probably doing it wrong.) Zombies present a problem that can be addressed in a tangible, unilateral manner. This is in addition to the fact that the situation is lacking in moral ambiguity, as observed above - zombies present an evil that every one of us can confront, and defeat, head-on.

The key to surviving any natural disaster is preparedness, and surviving a zombie apocalypse is little different. This conclusion is a natural deduction from the previous point; since zombies are mindless automata, their behavior is very predictable. Since their behavior is predictable, one can survive by being prepared. A prepared individual can be practically assured of survival before the dead begin to rise. The careful observer, who checks every building for its defensibility, knows where to find food, water, and shelter in an emergency, and sizes up every item for its utility as an improvised weapon, will be rewarded for his paranoia when the zombies come.

This leads me into one of my genuinely serious points. Survivalists tend to be crazy people; rather, if you're a survivalist who drives a car, you're an idiot, since you're much more likely to die in a car accident than be in a situation where lifelong paranoia will save you. And yet, the nutbag gun-totin' survivalist understands one very important thing. Modern society is interdependent to an incredible degree. The food I ate today probably came from all over the continent, if not overseas. By its nature, the fragility of any system is proportional to its complexity. Any significant upheaval (such as might be brought on by a zombie apocalypse) would, to put it lightly, have a major impact on modern society as we know it, by disrupting this interconnectedness that is only noticed in its absence.

As stated previously, this sort of upheaval doesn't have to come from zombies. In fact, the best predictions of the consequences of an outbreak can be found by considering non-zombie-related historical examples. The first one that comes to mind is Hurricane Katrina, and the chaos in New Orleans and the surrounding area that followed, but this is simply a recent, American example. Wars, plagues, famines - all provide us with object lessons in the outcomes of a zombie apocalypse.

Here's the key bit: the reverse is also true. Zombies aren't real. I'll be the first to admit it. However, acting like they are can give insight that can be applied to other, real dangers. Zombies are not going to come shambling through Pittsburgh, but if there was (say) a flood, a riot, a total collapse of government and civilization... I'd like to think that I'd be better prepared, more likely to keep my cool and make it through alive, because I've spent so much time thinking about zombies.

(Note: I am not the first to come to this conclusion.)

So bring on the zombies. I'll be brandishing my machete at the top of my demolished staircase, laughing and thinking This is the day I've been waiting for as they come. And when it's not zombies, but flash floods, or jackbooted fascists, or the onset of middle age... well, maybe I'll be ready for those, too.

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remember that I love you

All We Want To Do Is Eat Your Brains
We're Not Unreasonable; I Mean, No One's Gonna Eat Your Eyes

I think about zombies a lot.

I own two copies of Max Brooks' seminal (1) survival guide on the subject, as well as a hardcover copy of the novel set within the same canon whose dust jacket is now literally a jacket made of dust due to re-reading. I size up any structure I occupy for its defensibility in the case of an outbreak. I live in Pittsburgh, the city that spawned George Romero and his genre-defining Blank of the Dead series.

Thoughts of this sort are rarely, if ever, far from my mind, but lately I've been asking myself, why zombies? Why not vampires or werewolves or the Chupacabra or some other fictional monster? Zombie material (movies, books, video games) are generally classified as "horror", but I'm not really into any horror that doesn't involve zombies. What's so special about them?

Taking a step back, why not occupy my thoughts with the many real dangers the world presents, like flash floods or girls? For that matter, why dwell on terrible things at all? Most of my conclusions on the subject amount to "If this does happen, my life / my home / my country / my species is completely fucked". It's not like this thinking actually causes me to make any changes in my lifestyle, other than the aforementioned shovel. One of the best things that I could do to prepare for an outbreak would be to ensure that I'm in good physical condition if (when) it occurs. If I care so much about this stuff, why am I not willing to take such a simple step, which would have all sorts of other benefits for my life in addition to the zombie-preparedness factor?

These questions are not merely rhetorical. Answers will follow, in due time, but I'm trying to get back into the swing of updating this damn thing. Astute readers will note that this is an entry in the works for over six months; in the ideal world that my writings are helping to create, (3) all patience is rewarded in due time.

(1) The first definition.

(2) Empirical testing has indicated that it is less effective for this purpose than I had previously hoped.

(3) This statement is only true in the broadest sense; if everybody posted a quantity of rambling musings within the same order of magnitude as this website, the Internet would collapse, followed shortly thereafter by society.

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'cause there's so little else occupying my head