We Hate Zombies

Scenario:
It’s 10/31/2008. OMFG, it’s Halloween again!!! This is the single most dangerous holiday for all of mankind. It’s the one day in the year where you could be killed for simply dressing like a zombie but you could also save the world for simply dressing like a zombie. It doesn’t make any sense when you really try and wrap your meaty brain around it, but give it a shot anyway. And take a shot already, because it’s going to be one long day and I can’t have you freaking out on me. So, what are you going to do? Dress like a zombie and die or dress like a zombie and save the world? The choice is yours, but the outcome isn’t.

What you should do:
Never dress like a zombie if you are optimistic. There are a lot of reasons why this is the only option for you and they are all pretty obvious. I will now go over them with you in case you aren’t an “obvious” type of person (you should probably dress like a zombie if this is the case).

One, by not dressing like a zombie, you run a much lower chance of being mistaken for a zombie. This benefits you in that I will not automatically kill you. Matthew will not automatically kill you. The tens and twenties of people out there who are trained like we are will not automatically kill you. Plus, if the zombie apocalypse does come, you won’t be mistaken as a real zombie and killed by any of the gun-toting military/redneck people who have been waiting for a reason to open fire on the public. Does it scare you that the military thinks about that? Good. Fear keeps you sharp unless you are one of those pussies who caves in like a kid with polio. In that case, you are wearing a zombie costume I hope.

Two… Hmm. Nope, I guess that is the only reason to not wear a zombie costume.

If you are pessimistic, then wear the zombie costume. When the zombie apocalypse does come, you will be able to hide more effectively amongst the zombies so that they don’t attack you. By doing this, you may be able to bring down the zombie armies as part of the last resistance. Plus, I don’t want to hear all the bitching and whining when the apocalypse does come and you can’t watch your daily dose of Opera and Dr. Phil. It makes it easier for me to kill you and claim it was an accident by blaming it on all the LSD and the strobe lights.

What I would do:
Each and every year, Halloween comes and goes and the next morning I have this horrible feeling of regret and a terrible pounding in my head. No, I don’t get wasted and bang a fat chick, although that would bring a similar feeling to me, but not as severe. That would be all too simple. No, I fall victim to what we in the business call a “false positive”. This occurs when my IZRM goes off and some poor shmuck ends up dead because he was dressed up like a zombie a little too well. Usually this happens more than once. In fact, it happens so often that I get a headache from it all and I have this horrible feeling of regret. I don’t regret that I killed them, just that they weren’t zombies. Dang, now I feel a little down.

**Smacks himself in the face**

Anyway, each year, I put out a warning that the ZAC (zombie advisory color) has been upgraded to “yelling yellow”. Yelling yellow signifies to the public that they are in grave danger for two reasons: the chance for the zombie plague to spread quickly is at its peak and that they run the very real danger of suddenly dying because of a lack of bones, courtesy of me. The danger of zombies spreading out of control is so real because it will take a lot longer before anyone realizes what is happening. When one zombie tears into someone standing next to you on a regular day, you freak out. On Halloween, however, you laugh and play along by letting it tear into you. Soon, an entire party is full of zombies and nobody was even smart enough to call for help. Then an entire neighborhood, the city, the state and it goes from there. All without anyone bothering to ask the question, “Is this real or fake?” This is as real and serious as the Routan Boom. Watch out.

What this is all about:
There are very few times in the year when you can look “normal” while practicing for retaliation during the coming zombie invasion, and Halloween is easily the biggest of those times. After certain mishaps, Geoffrey and I discovered that we could avoid the typical Halloween “accidents” and “man-hunts” if we took out our zombie aggression on something almost as meaty and solid as the human head: a pumpkin. That’s why we started making zombie pumpkins, to express our hatred and zealotry on something other than 5-year olds in white makeup. Now you can to!

Getting started:
Find yourself a picture of a zombie online. Make it simple, preferably in black and white, and blow it up to a pretty big size that matches your pumpkin. Then you need to lay out your tools and everything else you’ll need. You can see here that I’ve already made my zombie stencil and taped it to the pumpkin. The tools I need are all on the table except the tequila, which is in my hand.

Applying the stencil:
After you have everything you need to get started, including a good buzz, use a sharp instrument (or tool provided) to outline the sections of your stencil onto the pumpkin. You can try cutting through the paper, but it will end horribly and people will laugh at you, so just outline the stencil with something sharp and then get rid of it. Make sure you outline enough of the sections that you can see where to cut and what to remove. Sometimes it can get a little ugly.

Carving it out:
You can use whatever you want for carving on the pumpkin. Good ideas include tools in carving kits, small screwdrivers, and butcher’s knives. Bad ideas include feet, empty bottles of tequila, and Chuck Norris. Now, depending on your stencil, you can either cut all the way through the pumpkin, or, as I did here, simply shave off the thick outer skin of the pumpkin. Light shines through either way, but you have more control with the latter method. The wall of the pumpkin will need to be thin for light to shine through brightly, so trim off extra pumpkin crap out from the inside.

Adding highlights:
What do you do when you want to add a little extra flair to the pumpkin? You could use makeup, feathers, perhaps pictures of naked women (or men), maybe even an ex-girlfriend. Or, in my case, you can just cut through the pumpkin completely. The holes will show more light than the skinless pulp, so they will appear much more prominently. Here I cut out the teeth and eyes because those are the most important parts of the zombie face. Can they see you and are they eating you?

Light ‘er up!
Use a light to check for consistency and to make touch-ups. Then put a big ass candle inside. And you’re done! Or whatever.

At last, retribution!
Commence your attack! Again, get the necessary materials, then do whatever the hell you want. Do notice how little fire effects the zombie skull. This is true to life, you can’t easily kill a zombie with fire.

As you may have noticed, this is not a game review. I know there are some of you out there who really look forward to playing and dominating a new kind of zombies each week when Wednesday rolls around, but simmer down. Things will go back to normal in no time, but this week I stumbled upon something special.

As I was searching the web for news of a zombie outbreak, I found a nifty little survey that will tell you, with an unknown amount of accuracy, what your personal MPG would be. Basically, if you drank a gallon of food/water stew, how far could you walk before you ran out of fuel and passed out. The reason I am devoting an entire post for this is simple.

When the zombies come, and they will come, you will need to know how long you will be able to run on a limited amount of food. I know that some people have a good idea already. You are probably a fat ass and know that you’ll go down in a matter of minutes. Basically, you would be the Semi-truck of the human race. Then there are some of you that could go all day because you are athletic and whatnot. You are the motorcycle.

For the rest of you, this is a great tool. Not only do you get to find out how you will stack up when the zombie apocalypse is upon us, but you can also find out ways to better your odds. Experiment with the options and find out where you stand. If you don’t like the answer, see what you can do to make it better. I finished with an honest 40.5 MPG for the motorcycle rating. Nice.

40.5 miles per gallon

Created by The Car Connection

Scenario:
You’re a tourist down in Hollywood, enjoying the scenes and hoping to catch a glimpse of a real Hollywood star. You’ve taken a wrong turn and end up in parking lot 6E of some shopping complex when you stumble upon them. Hundreds of zombies just lying around in the parking lot. You are perplexed and unnerved by the fact that they just seem to be resting which is uncharacteristic. All of the sudden, they start up towards the streets. What do you do?

What you should do:
They are coming your way and you have to think fast. Ask yourself, what would Simon Pegg do? He would act like one of them in order to reach safety. Brilliant!! As the zombie mob comes around the corner, you being to saunter and lazily roll your head around in such a way that you blend in perfectly. You just have to make it outside where it will be safe to run.

As the crowd approaches the surface, you see a young couple heading your way. They are in incredible danger and don’t even seem to notice, but you can’t risk yelling out a warning because you will instantly be covered in hungry zombie mouths. Obviously this couple is not deserving of such a sacrifice because of how dumb they must be, so you watch in horror as they are surrounded by the zombies. You throw up in your mouth, not a little but a lot, but swallow it all back down to make their sacrifice mean something.

The crowd starts to disperse and you know that the couple is dead. You actually see them saunter toward the front of the group when it happens. Suddenly the entire zombie army that you have gotten trapped in breaks into a song and dance. In fact, you can even hear Michael Jackson’s Thriller playing somewhere in the background. You panic because you don’t know the moves and run for your life. The zombies are too caught up in the dance to follow and you live to see another day. How odd.

Later, you find out that there were no zombies, but just a bunch of idiots dressed as zombies, putting themselves at risk, just to do a stupid dance in the streets of Hollywood. You shake your fist at the video.

What I would do:
Whenever I come across a horde of zombies that happens to be unfortunate enough to be located underneath a building, I always know what to do. I have a specially designed bomb hidden in the lining of my stomach for just such an emergency. It is about the size of a grapefruit and I keep it safe in a latex glove.

After throwing up the bomb I keep hidden, I located one of the major support beams of the garage. Just a quick punch through the beam and there is enough room to fit my bomb snuggly in the middle for maximum destruction. I set the timer for thirty seconds and hit the road. If I don’t make it out alive, at least I got the bastards.

Thirty seconds later I am safely in the Cuban bakery down the street enjoying a fresh natilla when the bomb goes off. The entire building is destroyed and so are those dirty, stinking, zombies. God bless America (and Cuban pastries).

Scenario:
Ah, there’s nothing quite like fishing in a river, no better way to reconnect with nature than floating in a shoddy little boat with stinking worms and hooks, far from the civilized world.  You’ve found yourself a little elbow in the river, where the bugs and water move lazily, and you start drifting slowly, quietly, listening to the frogs and swatting at mosquitos.

You cast, get a few nibbles, then curse the loss of your worm.  You cast again.  BITE!  Feels like it’s huge, and you start pulling and reeling for all it’s worth.  Then something breaks the surface of the water nearby, looking like a floating bag in the water.  You look at it more closely and realize that it’s a coat, and then that there’s a body in the coat.  Suddenly, it starts thrashing dumbly, splashing face down in the water.  It’s not trying to swim.  You stop reeling as the line goes slack, and you look upstream.  Tens, then hundreds, of bodies come floating down the river, some thrashing in the water, others still but for their wildly rolling eyes.  Another body floats up from below.

Stinking zombies, scaring away the fish.  What do you do?

What you should do:
With zombies numbering in the hundreds, it’s clear that there is a major outbreak.  With any luck, the outbreak will be in some city shortly upstream and not nationwide.  It’s a safe bet that these zombies simply walked off some bridge or cliff while wandering about, but there’s no guarentee that either shore is safe.  However, depending on the speed of the river, the floating zombies may have travelled further than walking zombies.  If this is the case, you can estimate somewhat about how far downstream you need to travel to find some potential safety.

For starters, you should always fish upstream from where you park, just in case an event like this happens.  If you park and fish downstream, by the time you see the zombies it will be too late to get back safely.  With so many zombies clogging the river, you’re more likely to break your onboard motor on some submerged skull than you are to make it out alive.  So, if you parked downstream, it’s an easy matter of escaping ahead of the wave.

If you parked upstream, then you have two options, depending on the surrounding terrain.  If the river banks are covered with dense foliage, such as large bushes and trees, the floating zombies will be contained to the river and the surrounding area should be safe enough for you to go downstream a bit, then circle back to your vehicle on foot.  If the terrain is open and easy to move around in, then you should forget the car and go as far as you can on boat.  Call some people if you can, find out as much information as possible, then arrange a meeting place with some survival buddies somewhere down the river.

Note!  Don’t throw out your fishing gear.  You might find that to be a useful survival tool.  Cut your line, then pack up and take what you can, within reason.  If it turns out that zombiism infects fish, well…  Maybe it won’t be so useful, but you’ll probably be screwed anyway.  Zombiism in water will likely spread faster than floating zombies, so stay out of the water as much as possible and don’t get water on open wounds or in your mouth.  Actually, let’s just hope the zombiism doesn’t spread like that.

What I would do:
See, now this is the kind of thing I knew would happen.  That’s why I have dynamite.  But wait!  Dynamite is child’s play, like hamburgers, and everyone knows I carry dynamite under my bullet proof vest.  Besides, fishing with explosives is the first thing everyone thinks of.  No, dynamite won’t work here.  Too many zombies anyway.

Because I knew something like this would happen, I came a little prepared.  Sure, a Mercury Verado 300 horse power outboard engine might be a little overkill on any normal day in a little fishing boat, but heck, what doesn’t sink it only makes it faster!  (Tip: Fill oil drums with extra gasoline and store it in front of the boat.  This helps counter-balance the weight and provides additional fuel.)  With my water-hog ready to go, I’d blast upstream ripping ass through the smarmy bastards.  Oh man, it would be so loud and extremely bloody.

Now, I realize that there might be some issue with filling a river with zombie blood, but to be honest, I just don’t care.  Why?  Is it because I’m an ill-tempered disillusioned American sick of an apparently broken world?  No!  It’s because the water is probably already crap and should be boiled anyway.

When I get upstream to the first bridge, there’s really no other choice but to blow it up.  Now I use the dynamite, and hopefully the bridge and crap is enough to dam the whole river for a little bit.  With any luck, this will stop the zombies in their tracks and cause a tidal wave which I can surf back to my vehicle on.  Once back, I’ll probably start shooting missles randomly into the sky, or else I’ll start a forest fire and head for the mountains.  Bullet proof glass…  it’s better than sex.