We Hate Zombies

Scenario:
It’s been four weeks since the last time you did laundry, and unlike your moral fiber, your clothes can’t help but get a little dirty.  Twice, since you were desperate.  And a few things a few more times.  Now its time for the great cleansing.  You take your baskets of clothes down to your basement, where the laundry machines are, and start sorting the clothes.  You’re about to turn on the washing machine when you see pale feet start shuffling past your basement windows.  Then you hear a crash as something comes through the windows and doors upstairs.  Soon you can hear them moving throughout the house.  God damn zombies, can’t leave a man alone.  What do you do?

What you should do:
Stop worrying about dirty clothes, because now dirt is good enough for everyone who’s still alive.  You have two general escape routes, either the windows that are small and near the basement ceiling, or the stairs up and out of the house.  Of course, this would be easy if every house had a secret exit built in to the foundation and surrounding grounds, but so far the local governments have had deaf ears for my calls to revise the building codes.  Still, if I were you, which I’m not, but if I were, I would put in another exit.  And keep it secret; keep it safe.

Sadly, you did not anticipate the zombie invasion so soon that you would need to completely rework the foundation of your home in the short time you’d lived there.  Alas, now you are trapped in the basement, and all of your arsenal for zombie destruction is in the living room.  There’s no telling how many zombies there are between you and those sweet justice sticks, but one thing you can do is quietly estimate how many zombies there might be from the sound of their shambling.  Once you have an idea, you’ll know what you’re facing.

Now, I wouldn’t recommend trying to escape out the basement windows.  If you’re anything like me, you’re no cat.  Climbing out of a window that high, not to mention a window that small, would be neither quick nor pretty.  In the time you’re struggling to get up and out, you might attract a dozen zombies ready to eat your face.  So, you’re going to need to take the stairs, which means you’ll also need a diversion.

First, wrap some extra clothes around your arms, hands, neck, and legs.  That will help keep any surprise zombies from taking you out of the game early.  Next, determine where the furthest room is from that basement door.  Hopefully there won’t be any zombies there yet, but whatever, zombies are dumb.  Then, once you have yourself together, start slamming into the basement ceiling.  The dumb zombies will think that there’s someone stomping the floor in the back room and will naturally shamble that direction.

Try to listen after a rapid burst of hits to see if you’ve successfully distracted the zombies.  If not, bang a few more times and then listen some more.  Once the zombies have started to move away from the stairway door, quietly and quickly work your way up the stairs, then crack open the door.  If the coast is clear, decide if you should make an exit or make a run for those zombie killing weapons.  Either way, best of luck to you.

What I would do:
What, you don’t line your house with explosives?  I remember thinking when I installed them that it seemed a pretty standard practice.  At the time, I was having a bit of a crazy time in my life, what with changing jobs and locations and getting new restraining orders, so there was a little tension amongst those who realized I had enough construction grade dynamite to destroy the neighborhood.  Fortunately dynamite is relatively stable when it’s fresh, so all of my hammering and juggling practice didn’t lead to some things happening that I would maybe have regretted.  Now, if you ever saw my house, you’d never know that there were crates and crates of dynamite tucked into the walls.  Well, all I can say is that it helps me sleep better at night.

So where am I going with all of this?  Restraining orders, that’s where.  They don’t really work because they were designed by rational, civil people to protect someone from irrational, crazy type people.  Consequently, the whole idea is fundamentally flawed, and if there’s one thing a zombie isn’t, it’s civil.  Or rational.  Just like zombies, crazy type people will shamble right through that restraining order to kill you.  Even the idea of zombies is a little irrational, which is why you have to be a little crazy to out-do them.

Actually, I think I did lose my train of thought.  Nevertheless, let’s just assume that if I’ve run out of clean clothes, there’s a pretty good chance that I’ve left a few guns in the back pocket of some pants.  Combine those few bullets with the placement of dynamite, and you’ll soon realize there was a plan to all this madness.  I would use the guns to actually shoot some of the dynamite, which would, of course, blow up on account of the sweating nitro-glycerine steadily losing stability.  Since this would undoubtedly cause a chain reaction with the other dynamite, the whole house would likely be destroyed in a massive fireball and something of a crater.  Anticipating this, I would crawl into the washing machine before I fired, so that I would be protected from the blast.  (I have it on good account that one can survive a nuclear explosion in a fridge, so this should work just fine for a much smaller explosion).

I didn’t really like that house anyway.