Before I review what we have and have not learned from The Walking Dead series on AMC, let’s not forget that first, Walking Dead was a comic by Robert Kirkman. Reading, reading, always be reading!!!
The Reading and Walking Dead
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Zombie Yard Gnomes
Art is a wonderful coping mechanism in the face of horrendous trauma. Garden gnomes are excellent omens of good cheer and health. Combine them and you have expressive testaments to survival. Gartenzwergs thwart zombies with great flair and relish, and they can do so in your garden, thanks to Chris and Jane’s Place.
Hellish Races
While I do not advise participating in any “zombie shuffles” where one dons zombie garb and mocks the bringers of death and pestilence by pretending to be their kin, you may want to explore several of the spate of recent footraces that incorporate obstacles or pseudo bad guys. As long as you are not confusing yourself by allying with an already distressing enemy, nor confusing me by looking a lot like creatures that I train to slaughter, it can be useful to explore the notion that basic cardio on a smooth path will not be the reality of your post-apocalyptic track career.
Any 5k or 10K can help you solidify your cardio skills and your ability to tolerate running in a crowd without getting trampled, but some courses aim to challenge you even further. The nationally syndicated Warrior Dash may be a gimmicky money-making machine, but it can also give you a taste of running in old footwear and overcoming your fear of heights without slowing down. Where else are you going to get sanitary, relatively safe experience clambering on top of old, ruined, slippery-as-an-eel cars in the mud?
There are also running events where you can pay people to chase you in a more organized and professional manner than arranging for your hillbilly cousins to stalk you in the corn field. The westerly Run For Your Lives combines the frustration of climbing a cargo net with the adrenaline rush of flag football, where the flags represent your brains. If you cross the finish line with one or more flags, it signifies your survival in the face of pursuit and hardship. There is some debate as to whether or not you will be thrown, screaming onto the burn pile at the end if you do not retain any of your flags.
If you are not ready for such serious stakes, there are many less threatening options, where you can just wear survival garb and train yourself to prioritize your destination over killing every undead poser in sight. For example, the Portland-based Run Like Hell will not seek to playfully destroy you, but you can, at least, pay good money to motivate your training schedule.
Lastly, these races can all help remind you to always be prepared. If you don’t pack a towel to clean yourself off at the end of the likes of The Warrior Dash, you will have to bathe yourself in the filthy, shared pond, where your comrades who have already starting their celebratory drinking are vomiting and disturbing the bees nests. Bring hand sanitizer. Always.
Basic Cardio
In the post-apocalypse, if you want to peruse the moldy and looted isles of your local grocery store for the last, dented can of creamed corn, you may not be able to up and drive to the market. You might need to conserve gas, avoid the horrendous noise of the engine or keep off of the roads that will be clogged with abandoned cars that contain the dead clawing to get out. Walking will be a nice, easy stealth option, but if you get noticed, you’ll have to run, and depending on how far away your destination is, walking might be too slow to get you back to base camp on once piece or before dark. Jogging is the way of your future. It’s reasonably quiet, aside from your wheezing. And stepping over fallen trees, comrades and electrical wires isn’t as hard on foot as it is on wheel.
We’ll learn about cross-country running and other longer, ultra-marathoner strategies at a later date. For now, let’s just focus on getting to and from nearby locations. If you live in the middle of no-where, far from towns and cities, you maybe have less call to run and more freedom to drive, but your raiding missions will still involve jogging from where you ditch your vehicle to the buildings of interest. On your next trip into town or the megalopolis, spy where you first get stuck in traffic and use that as your future parking location to calculate your basic cardio goals.
I live in a bougie neighborhood, specifically chosen so that I can walk to everything that I enjoy on a daily basis. Even when I was nine months pregnant and waddling like a Hutt, I could still make it to the nearby hospital for my appointments. In the future, when I pillage their stocks, I will have to do less jogging than you will. Here are the distances from my house to locations of looting interest:
Grocery Store (Fred Meyer on Hawthorne) .8 miles
Library (Belmont Branch) .7 miles
Hospital (Providence Medical Center on Glisan) 1.3 miles
Fresh Water Supply (City of Portland Reservoir Number 6) .7 miles
Hardware Store (Division Do It Best) 1.3 miles
Garden Store (Portland Nursery on Stark) .5 miles
As you can see from these meagre distances, I’m starting with the basics. I just want some canned goods from the grocery store, so I only have to make it 1.6 miles roundtrip. We’ll get to running as far as major waterways, airports and distilleries later. We are also going to pretend that these first forays out into the world of the damned are just scouting missions – you don’t have to carry anything yet. Nor are we going to squabble about footwear. If you already run in steel-toe boots or those barely-there monkey foot jobbers, go ahead and continue to feel superior. For now, and in the early days of the post-apocalypse, I’m going to have access to my fluffy clouds with laces.
In the world of cardio, the word on the street is that stretching and warming up is important. We’ve already covered getting limber in Calisthenics, but warming up outside of the compound has debatable merits. You could just do some jumping jacks inside of your fortress, but you’re really supposed to do something a bit more involved to avoid injury. Perhaps, as we tiptoe out of our secure abode, our very first quick walk around the block to see what we can see will be our warm-up. If the gut-munchers aren’t thick enough to scrap the mission entirely, the first pokes around the hood can raise our temperatures slightly. If we have to jog right off the bat, the first few min of our mellow pace will sufficiently act as a warm-up and lead us to believe that warm-ups were bullshit in the first place.
It is going to be necessary that our jogging pace be mellow. Not only is a mellow pace going to allow you to warm up and spit the nicotine out of your system, but it is quieter than slamming your feet around on the pavement. A slow and steady pace will help assure that you don’t spend all of your energy in the first half of a block and burn-out or cramp yourself to a certain death in the middle of a horde. The more moderately you go, the less likely you are to panic and miss the warning signs of an obvious death trap. To maintain proper vigilance and stamina, breathe steadily and confidently as you jog. Survey your surroundings. Notice the gait of those around you, take note of possible high ground, admire the preparedness of others, or look down on their innocent naivete with scorn and derision.
If you are less than in shape, and you have a hard time remaining in motion, it may help you to picture a deranged mob loping behind you. There is no need to stress yourself out or anything, but there’s a real chance that if you stop, you’ll die. And you’ll die just as slowly as you were moving, while the monsters pull your intestines into their gaping maws inch by inch. So get moving. We’re starting with the location of interest that is closest to your house. You need that last, dented can of creamed corn. You can make it this short distance. You must.
After you have been to your location of interest, and seen just how bad the situation is, and just how under-prepared you are in terms of amo, you are going to have to sprint the last three blocks or so on the way home, circling and winding around and out of sight, to lose your pursuers. You don’t want them to follow you back to your lair. You want to ditch them in your dust and duck unseen back into your cozy survival nest.
This is a daunting task. That’s why we’re preparing now, instead of waiting for the mushroom clouds to start blooming. If you don’t suck it up and get your lungs working now, you’re going to end up like that guy down the street who uses that cheap, plastic faux picket fence around his daisies – with the soulless pouring in through his garden window and eating his wife wrapped in her bluebird apron burrito.
As I strive to reach my basic cardio goals, I will snap pictures of some of my neighbors’ accidental preparedness triumphs and follies. This will also lead to our first attempts at proselytizing. Attempts at conversion should not be wasted on Jesus. Preach of zombie wiseness to the masses. We will also explore the technical aspects of lactic acid and slow-twitch muscles.
NOTE: All of this talk of jogging assumes that the undead will be slow stumblers. If the zombies turn out to be really fast, coked-out dashers like in 28 Days Later or the Reavers from Serenity, we’re all dead if we’re caught outside. The strategy then won’t be to out-jog them, it will be to remain unseen and indoors through several waves of infection, while they bash each other’s heads in, which they will do until they dehydrate, not starve.
Muscle Without Mind
NPR and the The New Yorker have recently covered the burgeoning field of synthetic meat – muscle cells grown in “test tubes” (I suspect that microbiologists object to such blunt descriptions of what is undoubtedly highly specialized nerd gear). Unfortunately, both articles focus on the potential volume of meat that synthetics could provide to the global population in only a pre-apocalyptic scenario. Putting aside how such lab-made cell cultures may taste – given that the flavors our pallets tend to enjoy are products of what the animal ate and how they moved – and putting aside that most of us should eat less meat than we currently do – for health and ethical reasons – such strangely marbled meats may, ultimately, only be helpful for the very, very few chumps who know how to make it.
When the lights go out, it will be really, really nice to be those three guys locked inside the super secret test facility with amazing security and several back-up generators that don’t threaten to fail until said scientists are at the peak of their interpersonal tension over who ate the last of the other rations, and, also, they are about to cure the zombie plague if only the power will last a little longer. For those of us clubbing stumblers to survive on the outside, their squabbles over whose job it is to cook the next batch of mealy myofibrils will seem petty to all of us and the gruff weapons expert of our group will wish out loud that some broke-ass post-doc student had gotten a grant to study machete-sharpening, instead of the government trapping three eggheads together inside of a doomsday building with the only steak around.
In addition to being a perishable, unsavory and power-dependent food source, synthetic meat certainly won’t help us maintain hearty, bio-diverse herds before the end of the world. More than just having meat from labs, and more than just having a few varieties of cattle mass-produced, we need a gazillion varieties of beef, pigs and fowl running around our hillsides, instead of becoming decrepit, weak versions of themselves indoors. Our stock will need to be exponentially more robust after the apocalypse and we should not narrow the playing field of genetic competitors that could survive alongside us long enough to end up on our plates.
If vegetarians don’t lead to the apocalypse by clamoring for guilt- and death-free food that turns on us, mutates and eats our brains, we will definitely need them on our survival teams, because we’re all going to have to do with fewer burgers and the vegans know all of the good root vegetable recipes.
Airport Safety
An airport is a terrible place to be during a zombie outbreak: sealed doors, huge crowds and few weapons. Airports will be seething hotbeds of infection when panic sets in and everyone tries to leave town. Plus, airports will be military targets if and when any one nation (possibly including your own) decides to bomb any other nation. What are you even doing at an airport during an outbreak? You should know better.
But let’s say that you don’t know about the outbreak and it catches you completely off-guard as you ready to board for a discount island getaway. Your blood pressure rises as you see sickening, dying and reanimating travelers in flip-flops and track suits.
Firstly, do NOT get on your flight! The only place worse to be than an airport during an outbreak is on an airplane!
Secondly, you must arm yourself. You definitely gave up all of your best weapons to pass through security, even if you travel with a decent-sized rock in your carry-on duffle bag, which you probably don’t, because wheeled suitcases are more fashion forward and those heavy stones tend to give you more backaches on uninfected vacations than they are worth. Perhaps you can pick your rolling case up by its handle and batter the shamblers with it a few times before it breaks, but likely you are going to need to find killing tools elsewhere.
If you are near security, perhaps you can retrieve your or others’ confiscated weapons. Sadly, most of the TSA’s collection will be toenail clippers, key chain pepper sprays and other purse-bottom riff-raff that is much harder to use lethally than they would have you believe. Best case scenario, you can team up with an individual officer or tackle one who is already infected and pray that her only armament is not a taser. More likely, you are going to get tased without ever noticing that the security line rope stands are pretty decent for swinging.
Some items that you can grab around any old airport may be useful: flag poles, greeting card racks or large bottles of tariff-free liquor can be swung somewhat effectively in a pinch. But head to the food court – their chairs and cooking utensils will likely be the best weapons in the area and if you really get stuck, you can lock yourself in a storage room and worry about the temperature and exit rout after you nibble on uncooked french fries and wait for the brain-eaters to get distracted by some other noise. Knives, serving spoons and table bases can take out a few more shufflers than unwieldy display cases and rolled up celebrity rags.
Your real goal here is to escape the revenant-riddled horror hanger. Spy the layout of your gate and terminal. Where are the locked doors? You probably can’t break the window glass, but after you arm yourself, you may be able to club an undead flight attendant or staff and steal their set of keys. Once you have obtained a set of keys, you will have to fend off your would-be diners while you search for the correct key to the correct door. Else you will need to fend off an entire airport full of hungry zombies on your way to the front door, where you will have to hotwire a car from the parking garage or lope away on foot. If you make it to a tarmac, mechanics’ tools and checked baggage will make for better deadly weapons that what you are toting from Panda Express. Re-arm and flee.
If you are stuck on an airplane during an outbreak, you are effed in the A without lube. Hopefully the pilots can land the plane while you happen to be the one who locked yourself in the bathroom at the first sign of trouble. Good luck fighting your way to an exit row. Would you rather be eaten and join the hordes or dehydrate to death in a coffin-sized shitter while the moaners claw at your cage door?
It is worth noting that after you are settled elsewhere in the midst of a walking dead world, airports can be a helpful place to raid for supplies: gas, mechanical parts, tires, small vehicles and other people’s clothing will be available in abundance if you are well enough armed and organized to break in rather than breaking out in the first place. Be very wary, however: most airport break-ins will kill you faster than an average burning wreck falling from the sky. Both require Xanax.
Hotel Hunkering Highlights
All alliteration aside, hotels can be a very valuable resource during the apocalypse. Not only might you be traveling when the plague to end all plagues hits, but even if you are home, safe and sound, when the devils sweep your nation, you may need to travel cross-country later. Or you may get trapped downtown or near an airport on what was supposed to be a short day trip. There are many hotels in this world and they aren’t the most terrible place to blockade yourself.
First of all, hotel doors are very useful. They slam effectively and are often nice, strong fire doors with peepholes, deadbolts and sturdy chain-like latches. There is often non-essential furniture in hotel rooms that one can use to barricade the door if more than several flesh-eating enemies pile themselves against the other side. Often affixed to the door is a small map highlighting what is not only the basic layout of your floor, but of almost every floor.
Whenever you check into a hotel, be sure that you can locate the emergency exits incase of fire or incase you end up on the run from a hungry horde. Be aware of the differing layouts of all lobby, kitchen and banquet room floors. If you can suss out where an emergency roof access point is, all the better. At the very least, you should be aware of all potential staircases, for when the lights go out.
Because most modern hotel staircases are made of steal and cement, you will not be able to destroy the stairs down to lower floors to prevent ghouls, interlopers and raiders from reaching your level. Luckily, because many hotel fire codes rely on such inflammable staircases, very few contemporary hotels have fire escapes along the external walls of the building. This means that you will not have an alternate exit from your room, however, it also means that you do not have to worry about barricading your windows. The fresh morning air coming in through the open windows and the natural light streaming in may more than make up for your need to create a makeshift ladder or wait out the ghouls at the door. Never stay on the first floor – robbers will creep in an steal your laptop if nothing else.
For the love of holes in their heads, always check your pockets twenty times before leaving your room when the power grid fails – there will be no concierge to let you back in after you lock yourself out into the hell hole that the world has become. Beware that you may have to leave your door inconspicuously ajar, as the lock will only function from the inside without normative electricity. Simply do not call attention to the fact that your room is open, and perform a cursory check for intruders when you return.
When eventually you need to get past any of the deadmeats that have either gather near your door or reanimated on your floor, you will need to find yourself some weapons. Unless you want to constantly explain to the TSA while you travel with a machete, you will have to make do with what you can scavenge, which can be difficult in small quarters with cheap lamps too flimsy to crack a skull. Unfortunately, due to the high risk that you will be the prematurely panicked crazy person swinging at healthy human beings, most buildings have done away with emergency fire axes that one simply had to break glass to reach. The legs of the small desk or the pole from the closet or shower may be your best bets until you can reach the large kitchen knives or banquet hall flagstaffs.
The three largest dangers to meeting the end of the world in a hotel are being away from your stocked home base supplies, running the stairs weaponless and the threat of a genuine fire. As soon as the dead dawn in earnest, you must begin a strict rationing of the snacks that you have kept in your travel case and greedily kept in paper bowls from the breakfast buffet. Filling the bathtub with water would be another wise idea, and as soon as you are sure that the hotel staff will not be upset with you for prying apart furniture to arm yourself, start sanding away the splinters on the rough edges.
To prepare yourself for moving from level to level with speed, grace and crappy defense wares, we will cover stair-running in future sections. Cardio, balance and buns of titanium will be of the utmost importance. Until the running begins, continue your staple calisthenics, supplementing your will to live by relishing the open windows and folding cranes out of the New Testament.
Be aware that even if you seldom travel, hotels are numerous and useful. They can be raided for bedding, burnable furniture pieces, tinned kitchen items and relatively high views. Even sullied by a lack of your personal stockpiles and a moderate concentration of potential infectees, their height, durability and deffendability make them excellent assets. Just don’t get stuck at airports, dear traveler – those are deathtraps, which we will cover next week.
Post-Apoc Calisthenics
First things first.
We are going to need an endless series of skills in our quest to survive the zombie apocalypse, but what will we need in the beginning?
I will probably be at home when the first, second and third waves hit. While the rest of the world burns itself out, I will be hiding indoors with my non-perishable food supplies. If you have an office job or if you travel urbanely a lot, your cubicle or hotel room will function much the same way as my stocked and fortified basement. If you are regularly in public or outdoor spaces, you may find the future sections on Wilderness Tactics and Emergency Fortification more helpful. Look for them in future months.
My home base windows will be blocked, so hand-to-hand combat and grappling won’t be necessary skills until much later. I don’t advise leaving your home base until the initial stages of the emergency have past, so we will be losing some of our cardio and distance abilities while we remain safely inside. To entertain ourselves during the quiet, solitary period before we emerge to scavenge, rescue and defend, we will need a few good books, some ear plugs, a deck of playing cards and to build our flexibility and strength.
(For survival basics – including non-perishable food and playing cards – see Basic Resources.)
Calisthenics can be performed in relatively confined spaces and can help us use our own body weight for resistance like the Greek Gods did, or at least like Spartans going to war, which we will be shortly. Calisthenics help prevent deadly injuries. They encourage joint flexibility and stability and improve posture, machete-swinging range and molotov-throwing form. They can increase our ever-important will to live despite wearing outfits that allow for maximum breathability and seam integrity. Looking strident in sensible workout clothing has always been a confidence booster, and you will need this ability even more when the undead roam the earth.
Not only will calisthenics be the first activity we need during the apocalypse, but they are excellent exercises to break us into our serious Pre-Apoc Training. I have made myself a checklist of calisthenics exercises to perform daily, and it looks like this:
I have taken into account my recent and historical injuries and problematic areas when selecting the exercises that I will perform for at least one week before attempting Basic Cardio or other more strenuous activities.
I have recently carried and given birth to a small human, so I bring prenatal and midwifery skills to the post-apocalyptic table, but my abdominal muscles need special attention, and I have selected plenty of sit-ups and core-focused exercises, like the Crab Hold, which is like crab walking minus the walking.
Because my abs are currently less than ideal, I also tend to hurt my back a lot and make loud old man noises that could give away my position to one or more of any number of enemies as I move through the disaster scape of the future. Abdominal workouts will help correct this, but I have also added press-ups, the seal pose and some bends that cross my midline.
Historically, some typical jogging annoyances, such as shin splints and knee pain have plagued me. To help prevent these turn-me-into-bait pangs I have selected some foot turns, foot presses and standing leg lifts to fortify muscles that can be neglected by running proforma.
Variety is the spice of the survivalist life, so I also like to collect activities with titles so funny that they encourage me to regularly participate. Who doesn’t want to do a Mountain Climber (arms extended push-up hold while quickly alternating which knee gets bent and brought to your chest) or a Burpee (standing with arms in the air, dropping to a squat, then a push-up hold, then return to the original jubilant stance)?! When we eventually proceed to Advanced Calisthenics, we will discover the joys of such dynamic stretches as The Beheader and The Healthy Whore.
I have never had an arm or shoulder injury, so I will content myself with stretching and strengthening them via old standards like push-ups and the Thinker Hold (instead of hands and knees, you go elbows and toes).
Stretching all major and most minor muscle groups is vital before and after every Pre-Apoc Training workout. Any minor injury, strain or sprain can be a mortal wound after all of the lights go out. Take care of yourself. You can find some basic stretches and calisthenics here and here. Pick out an interesting and well-rounded routine. Make yourself a checklist chart. Perform every exercise everyday for at least a week before we embark on Basic Cardio, and continue them daily hereafter to help prevent bait-makers.
I am headed to Pittsburgh next week, where I will perfect my calisthenics, review Airplane and Port Safety and cover some basics of Infested Hotel Living.
Here We Are, Scraggly Survivor
Welcome to Little Guy Alive, A Zombie Preparedness Guide. It’s one little guy’s journey to remaining among the living.
Zombie Preparedness is not just for macho gun-swingers and twitchy nerds with D&D experience. Zombie Preparedness is for everybody. And it’s for you too.
Think you’ve got zero skills? Posh. If you’re a new parent, you’ve got a leg up on sleep deprivation functionality. In a wheelchair? Guess who isn’t catching you on a paved road. Chronic reflux? Your pain management is top notch already.
Think you are all ready to go? Really? You already did all of your cardio, weight-training, scouting, ammo checks, food preservation, first aid and mechanical engineering today? Bullshit. We all need more practice.
We’re in this together and if this little guy can do it, so can you. Let’s go.
Beth Mattson is an undead expert living and writing in Portland, Oregon. You can read more here. Or contact her at beth at bethmattson dot com.