We Hate Zombies

Scenario:
You and a buddy, not in a homosexual sense, are enjoying a rousing game of ping pong. The score is tied and the competition is intense. You are both sweating profusely, so you decide to take off your shirts to cool off a bit. Back and forth the ball goes but nobody will give an inch. Nobody will make a mistake. All of the sudden, you notice a bite wound on your buddy’s shoulder and he looks ill. He throws up zombie bile all over the table and heads your way. What do you do?

What you should do:
If you have learned anything from reading these articles, which I am sure some of you haven’t, then you should already be holding your large gun and shooting your hot load of lead right at his face. I prefer a shotgun, but to each his own. If you find yourself without a shotgun, I would suggest a different strategy.

Head under the table. Because the zombie buddy is going over the top of the table, he will be able to adjust his path to intercept you in any direction except backwards. Even backwards has its problems because he has the momentum and the speed and you are still standing their pissing your shorts waiting for the cows to come home. By heading underneath the table, you immediately place a barrier between you and him. Plus, you force him to change the direction he is going completely which quickly puts you in a great position.

Another good thing about going under the table is the unnecessary crap that ping pong tables usually have underneath them. All those support beams, and for what? The table itself only weighs twenty pounds. It is almost like a jungle gym down there and the zombie will certainly be slowed down by it. This should give you time to get the hell out of there and find someone with a gun.

What I would do:
I have a technique that few have ever heard of, until now. I have studied it for years and perfected its execution so that in a time of need, I can perform it flawlessly without the slightest thought. I call it the “I-Just-Got-Married Ping Pong Serve.”

Essentially, this is a serve that spins the ping pong ball so fast that it breaks the speed of light. While this miracle of awesome is occurring, it simultaneously causes each side of the ball to head in the opposite direction. Being that the ball is a sphere, sides are not the best term for it, but points. The combination of these two motions creates a small black void that nothing can escape.

It is not entirely a black hole but don’t expect me to explain why, it just isn’t. But it is a void. A void filled with nothing but death and despair. It is both dark and cold and will dissipate once it comes in contact with any object. That object also disappears. If you can’t keep up, I serve this black void right at the zombie, ending the threat and saving the world. Then I pick up my free shirt on the other side of the table and trade it to a bum for a cheap bottle of vodka. What a sucker.

A little bird sent me this article about using road signs to indicate the presence of zombies in a city.  I think this is interesting and very useful, especially if solar powered to keep them lit after the normal power grids go down.

But then I realized the article wasn’t about zombies or ruined cities at all, but about hacking road signs, which changed the whole meaning of everything at once.  I found myself asking a new question.  What would I have done if I saw a sign like this?

Sure, I ask myself this every day, all the time.  What would I have done if I were driving along and saw a sign warning of zombies in the next city?  Would I stop, turn around, head for escape?  Or what I forge ahead assuming some prank?  Even better, would I forge ahead searching for my destiny and expecting to find it in 7 miles?

If we shove the imaginary hypothetical situations aside for a moment and seriously look at the real state of things, what would anyone do?  If zombies had actually attacked and infected a city, these signs would be important notices to people driving in.  Would people stop, take notice, turn around, arm themselves, search for loved ones?  Or would they keep going, assuming some hooligans were calling Wolf?

Well, to forge ahead into a world of zombies would be dumb, and you would become as one in those movies we all scoff at, the one who didn’t notice the signs but forged ahead to death and misery.  No one wants to be that guy, the guy everyone else thinks was being an idiot because the script writers were dumb and needed an excuse for gore, the one who made so many mistakes everyone thinks they could do better with one leg tied to one arm behind their back.  That’s the risk you take for ignoring the signs.

And yet what if it were a joke?  If you turned around, playing it for the safe side, pretty much everyone will assume you’re just plain nuts.  Just crazy.  Of course, that’s if it was all a prank (which it was in this case).  So you risk looking like a fool, or an idiot, or at best some paranoid dangerous type of homeless person.  And you also waste gas, time, good plans, receiving only ridicule and ruined memories.

The immediate consequences would send you toward the edge of doom, causing you to drive on into the maws of death (or into a normal city without zombies).  The long term reward of life would only be rewarded if there really are zombies.  It’s a dilemma, and still a dilemma.

What would I do?  Easy.  Take it seriously but turn the radio on and keep on keeping on.  Shit like that gets around, if you know what I mean.

The topic for today is the disguise of the enemy. Of course we’re talking zombies here, and usually zombies are easy enough to recognize. There’s the usual drooling of bodily fluids from the blood-caked mouth, the stagger of limbs that have begun suffering from rigor mortis.  And then there’s the broken bones sticking through old tshirts, the naked or half-naked bodies pale and cold wandering in the day covered with the signs of hunting animals, the crawling dirt eaters with broken fingers and non-existent legs.  Ah, these are the faces of the zombies we know, our old friends, but what if one didn’t look like this.  What if one was, say, disguised.  Would you know?

Lesson 3: People You Used to Know

That is, people you recognize.  Sometimes there will come upon the world a plague of zombiism that has no decency and will snatch the ones you love from right under your very watchful gaze, and in such times this is one of zombies’ favorite disguises.  What happens when you see someone you recognize?  The gears in your mind start turning, trying to crank out all the relevant memories and facts you know about that person, trying to place them, remember the last time you saw them, remember their name.  This happens a lot for me, even with that one guy who does stuff sometimes on here.

Well, that doesn’t sound like a disguise.  And that’s exactly IT!  It’s brilliant because it’s so much a disguise even the disguise is disguised.  Take a moment to realize that while your sifting through all the bullshit memories you’ve had with that person in front of you, they’re taking the chance to creep ever nearer, just yearning to get within lunging distance.  And that’s not even them!  You, wallowing in the sentimental past of sun and fresh air, are in dire danger without even recognizing that the mobile mound of flesh before you is no longer who you used to think you knew but instead just another empty corpse-bag, waiting to be destroyed forever.

And that sums up the whole thing.  The trick, here, is that by being recognizable the zombie triggers something in your mind that wastes your time and gets in the way of your usual response mechanisms.  Instead of shooting first, you falter for a split second, trying to place a face or recognize a boob, and that might be enough time to annihilate the memory of you.

So what do you do?  Train yourself to turn response mechanism into reflex.  Take a moment, when you have one, to meditate and realize that the world you knew is gone and the people in that world are also gone, and the memories you had of people and the places you saw people are now worth nothing but in telling the story of your life or in comforting you with a past that had more hope than how it ended.  Train your mind to stop acting like this is high school, and soon you’ll realize you’re hands take care of the dirty work even when the mind isn’t in it.  Around here we have a word for it: IZRM.

Oh yeah, and you’re welcome.

Scenario:

You are out at the bar with a couple of the good old boys and you’ve decided to get drunk. We aren’t talking about your average, everyday get drunk for breakfast type of drunk though. We are talking about completely being shit-faced, absolutely blitzed, can’t-remember-what-happened-last-night-but-there’s-a-dead-hooker-lying-next-to-you drunk. After about beer twenty and a fifth of tequila, you are ambushed by a small group of zombies. What do you do?

What you should do:

Unfortunately, you are pretty much boned at this point.  You can’t even see straight, let alone get up and run away.  Your best bet is your car.  If you can make it into your car, lock the doors and drive.  It doesn’t matter who you hit, where you go, or how many tacos you need to order at Taco Bell.  You’ve just got to get out and away from the zombies until you have sobered up a bit.

If you cannot make it to your car, then pull out your gun and start shooting.  No sense in aiming because you can’t tell the difference between zombies and people, so just have at it.  It doesn’t matter if its an old man or a baby, shoot it until it stops twitching.  Remember, this is advice to give you the best shot at survival, not anyone else.  If all else fails, blow your own face off.  At least you won’t be a zombie.

If you don’t have a gun, they you are a freaking moron and deserve to die and come back as a zombie, only to be killed for real by me when we cross paths.  Seriously, who doesn’t keep a gun on them when they drink?

What I would do:

I have been known to black out when I drink.  Hell, I have been known to black out when I don’t drink.  In both cases, the result is always the same.  I have a splitting headache, my mouth is dry, and everyone around me is dead.  I must assume that this would be the case here.  Life has a funny way of surprising us, doesn’t it?

Scenario:
To help you train for the great zombie apocalypse, you decide to enter into a half-marathon because you’ve calculated that it takes approximately 13 miles for you to escape the city by a safe route on foot.  So, as it usually goes, you need some competition to boost your quest for the long distance run and you pay a little bit to be lured into a dangerous place full of people with only the hope of food and beer at the end.  Of course it would be the tenth mile when the zombies strike, and all around you are people half-dead from the run or completely dead but moving no slower.  Also, you’re tired as shit.  What do you do?

What you should do:
Obviously the first step is to get off the path.  The zombies will be quickly attracted to the sweat and stink of the runners, so there will quickly be a swarm of zombies all over the damn place.  You need to get off as soon as possible, then search for other means of escape.  Your plan to run out of the city has backfired and now you’re too tired to even swing a bat hard enough to crack an egg.

Of course, you can always try to find a car, and depending on what part of the run it is you might get lucky, but around here the cars tend to be cleared out a bit so runners don’t suffer from the exhaust poisoning.  However, one secret few realize is that there are golf carts used by race officials to haul off those too weak to move themselves.  Find one of those and you’re practically home free, assuming you can keep zombies off your grille long enough to get out of the area.  Good luck with that.

What I would do:
There’s no point starting something you’re not going to finish, and after having come 10 miles there’s no way in hell I wouldn’t finish that race.  The first thing I would do is keep on running, and through this strategy the zombies behind me won’t be able to catch up.  Then, when zombies come up in front of me, I’ll jump kick them in the chest and knock them down, or at least until I find some sort of club or blunt weapon or what not.

That will be a good day, running and jump kicking for 2 miles, enough to kill a man.  And you know what I would find at the end?  Not beer and hot dogs but more fucking zombies, just to say hello and congratulations and pat me on the back like Judas and Brute.  You’re probably thinking to yourself, Brute?  No, not Brute, but you have to imagine that little thing on the “e”, as in “et tu Brute.”  Dammit, leave me alone, I’m too busy to post twice a week let alone find out how to make that damn “e.”  Whatever.

At the end there’s nothing left to do but use the detonator on my watch to explode the bombs I hid along the route and particularly at the end.  I would get far enough away, of course, but I’d still like to see the explosion.  Sucks for everyone else that didn’t die yet, but atleast I won’t have to worry about them coming  back to nibble on my calf.  Which would be cramping.

Good day to you sir!