5 Popular Zombie Survival Tactics (That Will Get You Killed) Read more: 5 Popular Zombie Survival Tactics (That Will Get You Killed)

Everybody has a zombie contingency plan. A unique and ingenious stratagem they’ve spent hours contemplating that ensures they and their loved ones will stay alive in the event of a zombie apocalypse. The only problem? You’ve got the exact same essential plan as everybody else: go raid the gun store, get out of the cities as fast as possible, find a sturdy base to fortify and hole up in, use a melee weapon whenever possible to conserve ammo and–if the worst does come to pass and you find yourself facing down a crowd of the undead–take your time, aim carefully and make every shot a head shot.

Jesus, you’re not going to last five minutes. Here’s why:

#5.

Raiding the Gun Store

First things first: You need a firearm. The time for “common sense gun control” went out the window the second grandpa came back from the afterlife to make a sandwich out of your face. No matter what your political stance was before the uprising, you fucking love the Second Amendment now. You want the biggest, shiniest, loudest monstrosity possible. If there’s a gun that shoots a thousand bullets a second; that’s great. If there’s one that shoots a thousand flaming bullets a second; even better! If there’s a gun that shoots out other guns that all fire thousands of flaming bullets in mere seconds–like some sort of pyramid scheme comprised entirely of shredding death infernos–well, that would be just dandy. But even if you already have the god-king of firearms at your disposal, you’re still not ready. You need to arm everybody in your group, you need spares just in case and you need ammo. In short, you need to get to the gun store.

The only problem being: So does everybody else.

The closest gun shop to your house is also the closest gun shop to a thousand other people’s houses, and at least a few dozen of them are going to get there before you. Assuming that the place isn’t clean out–probably because the shop is either locked down like a fortress, or because the owners are barricaded inside and would rather like to keep their livelihood and defensive measures, thanks–you still need to get your arsenal. See, owners of gun stores tend to like guns, and people that like guns not only generally want to keep them, but are also quite capable of using them.

“You can have my gun… when you come down to my place of business and ask politely. I’ve got a lot, take one!”

Now you and a thousand other people are on the outside of a suburban fortress, hurling “pretty pleases” at a half-insane, heavily-armed, trained marksmen inside. Not only are you probably not coming away from the gun store with a shiny new weapon; you’d be lucky to get out of there without an impromptu sunroof installed in your skull.

#4.

Get Out of Town

A major city is the absolute worst place to be in the event of a zombie uprising. The population density alone spells trouble, so the farther you can get away from civilization, the better. At the very first sign of trouble, you need to get right the hell out of there. In fact, everybody does. And what happens when everybody in a city needs to get somewhere at the same time? Like, say, during rush hour? That’s right: deadlock. It’s just that this time, there’s a bit more emphasis on the “dead.”

One man’s traffic jam is another’s buffet line.

Blindly following your knee-jerk flee response has dropped you straight in the middle of Super-Rush-Hour, a hellish place where you sit futilely trapped in a confined space, surrounded by people who may or may not already be infected, but are certainly standing around looking delicious to the zombie hordes. You just wanted to get out as quickly as possible, but now look at you: Stuck in an unmoving meat-line with a thousand other morsels and the only thing your car is doing is keeping the freshness in until the ravenous human can-openers get there.

#3.

Fortify Your Base

Shelter, along with food and water, is one of the three main essentials absolutely necessary to human life. Just because there’s no more room in Hell for the dead, that doesn’t mean you no longer need a roof keeping your head dry. So you’d better get busy either finding or building yourself no less than an impenetrable fortress, and stay there until this thing blows over, right?

Not so much.

Putting yourself in a siege situation only works if there’s the possibility that the invading force will stop. But you’re not dealing with people here. Holding out against an army of people works because people can be reasoned with, they might have to leave to get supplies, or perhaps they’ll just weigh the pros and cons of the situation and leave.

Not like zombies.

“It’s been two months, so uh … you guys need anything? Coffee? Blankets? No? Nothing? Brains? Oh, OK! Brains it is.”

Zombies don’t get bored or impatient, they need nothing to keep them alive (because they’re, you know, not) and they’re not really known for their logistic prowess: No cons will be weighed here. Food is a pro. You are food. You are there. So there are only pros here. They will wait for you forever. But you will run out of supplies eventually, and every day you stay put in your nigh-invulnerable bunker is another day zombies pile up outside. Zombies aren’t a threat because they thin out gradually over time – they’re a threat because they fucking multiply. Zombies beget zombies beget zombies, and they do their best begetting while scrabbling incessantly at your door for months on end because they can hear you crying inside. All “holing up” in a stationary location does is make the zombies want it more.

It makes them savor you.

#2.

Conserve Ammo: Use Melee Weapons When Possible

The zombie apocalypse is a rough and tumble place, and most of us manage to rack up ER-worthy papercuts even at our current passive office jobs. In short: You’re going to have open wounds, and exploding heads tends to be a bloody affair. So if all body fluids infect, blood included, then bites are the least of your worries. Consider this: For the sake of argument, let’s pretend you don’t spend your free time reading about zombies on the Internet and are, instead, a human being at peak physical condition. Now, go outside and find the nearest, smallest wild animal. Good? OK, now dive-tackle that son of a bitch and try to take a bite out of it.

How did you fare? Did you manage to get even a lick out of that squirrel

“RAAAAAAPE!”

If yes, then holy shit! You really did that? That was just a hypothetical scenario. You’re crazy as hell. Don’t waste your time here, man. The zombie apocalypse is the least of your worries. The Devil is probably possessing your scrotum right now; you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

But if you didn’t manage to get a taste of that woodland critter, well, that illustrates the point nicely: Grabbing an unwilling victim with your bare hands and taking a bite isn’t easy. Things want to live, and they tend to move around a lot when you attempt to eat them, just like you will when grasped by a zombie. Just avoiding bites is not the problem. However, showering an attacker with your head-juice when it is bashing in your skull with a cricket bat is quite a different matter. That’s a fucking cakewalk. Bashing in a head at close range means you’re going to get blood everywhere; if you had so much as a scrape, now you’re a zombie. It’s much better to use up a bit of your ammo supply, rather than risk taking a crimson shower in skull leavings from the infectious undead.

#1.

Always Aim for the Head

Everybody knows that the only surefire way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain, and we’ve already established that you want to be as far away as possible when you do that, so at some point in time you’re going to be shooting zombies in the head. That’s actually one of the only good things about a zombie apocalypse; headshots are awesome! But think about that for a second: Headshots are impressive in movies and video games because they’re the hardest of all possible shots. Taking your time and waiting for the right moment is all well and good if you’re picking off roamers for a disturbing afternoon’s entertainment on a leisurely Sunday picnic, but if shit goes down and you’re faced with a crowd of zombies (they do tend to crowd, you see, quite rude like that) your last concern should be surefire kills, it should be getting the fuck out of there, finding a safe corner to sob in, and then finding a change of pants (in that order).

Relax. It became OK for men to cry somewhere around the time you had to blow your brother’s undead face apart.

Yes, headshots are the only way to kill the undead, but not the only way to stop them. A broken leg isn’t just a figure of speech; it’s a fucking leg that is broken. As in, it doesn’t work anymore. Regardless of the level of pain you are capable of registering, a shattered femur or severed spine renders anything essentially immobile. So quickly spraying waist-level fire into an approaching onslaught is a far better idea than lining up headshots for bonus points.

Plus, you’ve got to think: If there’s even the slightest tinge of humanity left in these shambling monsters, a nutshot is still going to at least wind the male ones. There’s a limit to what death can take away; ball-sensitivity might still be in play.

7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) Part 2

#3.

They Can’t Heal from Day to Day Damage

One advantage to having a fully-functioning central nervous system is that it also does a damn good job of letting you know you’ve been damaged. It does this by way of pain. Think about all the paper cuts, stubbed toes and nut shots you have suffered in your life. Now imagine they never healed, just sat there and rotted while you continued to rack up other paper cuts, stubbed toes and nut shots. Pretty much every wound you’ve ever had would end with an amputation. One thing we know about zombies from Romero and Fulci is that they are a clumsy lot, walking into doors and helicopter blades without a second thought about what kind of damage they are suffering.

While complete insensitivity to pain seems like an awesome superpower in theory; in real life, you wind up being more like Mr. Burns than Wolverine. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a neurological condition that some people are born with, meaning they don’t feel pain. They can feel everything else, but the absence of pain means they accrue damage to their bodies but are unaware of it. Even with the ability to call for help, loved ones watching out for them and our coddling society, this can still lead to all kinds of terrible shit, like infected body parts and bitten off pieces of tongue.

All the dings and bangs zombies will suffer after tripping, walking off of bridges and stumbling around on dark cloudy nights will eventually leave them limbless, toothless and with every bone in their body broken. Seriously, in the event of the Zombie Apocalypse, just stay inside, watch all the episodes of 24 back to back, then walk out on your lawn with your Corpse Rake and tidy up (you will have to buy a Corpse Rake, however, if for some reason you don’t already have one).

#2.

The Landscape is Full of Zombie-Proof Barriers

The zombies’ lack of coordination, along with the inability to see in the dark (we haven’t had any infrared zombies yet, but holy shit! We call dibs on the idea) is going to spell the doom of countless zombies in any area outside of a parking lot. This is a group that doesn’t know how to find roads or bridges. They just go wandering off aimlessly. Mountains, major rivers and canyons would thus quickly be home to piles of broken zombie rags stinking up the scenic views. Even if zombies had the foresight to not walk over cliffs or into raging rapids during the day, nightfall would result in most eventually walking into rivers, over cliffs and off of bridges, diminishing their numbers.

But even in nice, flat, paved cities, where it would seem like people would be extra-fucked, the landscape still works in favor of the living. History has shown that in most awful situations, people don’t always act like the panicky idiots in a horror movie. In cities, people would likely congregate in the upper levels of high-rise buildings, where the invasion can be held at bay with simple security doors. Also, the streets themselves would keep the undead corralled in straight, easy-to-aim-down lines where they could be picked off by snipers, or just bored office-workers waiting out the quarantine by dropping office supplies onto the undead from the top floors.

“Do you think we can fit chairs through this?”

#1.

Weapons and the People Who Use Them

As we touched on briefly above, if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it’s killing other things. We’re so good at it that we’ve made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. Add to the mix the sheer number of armed rednecks and hunters out there, and the zombies don’t even stand a chance. There were over 14 million people hunting with a license in the U.S. in 2004. At a minimum, that’s like an armed force the size of the great Los Angeles area.

Remember, the whole reason hunting licenses exist is to limit the number of animals you’re allowed to kill, because if you just declared free reign for everybody with a gun, everything in the forest would be dead by sundown. Even the trees would be mounted proudly above the late-arriving hunter’s mantles. It’s safe to assume that when the game changes from “three deer” to “all the rotting dead people trying to eat us,” there will be no shortage of volunteers.

Plus, if we look at zombies as a species, they are pretty much designed for failure. Their main form of reproduction is also their only source of food and their top predator. If they want to eat or reproduce, they have to go toe to toe with their number one predator every single time. That’s like having to fight a lion every time you to want to have sex or make a sandwich. Actually, it’s worse than that: Most top predators are only armed with teeth and claws, meaning they have to put themselves in harm’s way to score a kill. Humans have rifles.

Harm’s way is about 4875 feet from the end of this.

The zombies have no choice but to walk into bullets. And all this isn’t even counting all the other household hand guns in the world, nor the fact that zombies also have to contend with IEDs, Molotov cocktails, baseball bats, crowbars and cars that the general public will no doubt be using to cull their numbers.

And that’s just from the civilian population; counting the military and police, we have another three million or so armed people, and instead of just handguns shotguns and hunting rifles, they have machine guns, combat shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, sub-machine guns, grenade launchers and the occasional taser, not to mention the training to use them effectively. But why would they even bother? When they could just roll over swaths of zombies in tanks, blast them with cluster bombs and MOABs and mow them down with miniguns from the god damn Air Force that every zombie flick seems to forget about.

Really, even if zombies existed right now, the whole concept of a zombie apocalypse is just laughable. Now robots, on the other hand…

7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) Read more: 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)

Let’s pretend for a moment that zombies are real (as if half of you weren’t already daydreaming about that very thing). Have you noticed how most zombie movies take place only after the apocalypse is in full-swing? By the time we join our survivors, the military and government are already wiped out, and none of the streets are safe.There’s a reason the movie starts there, and not earlier. It’s because the early part, where we go from one zombie to millions, doesn’t make any sense. If you let the creeping buzzkill of logic into the zombie party, you realize the zombies would all be re-dead long before you even got a chance to fire up that chainsaw motorcycle you’ve been working on. Why?

#7.

They Have Too Many Natural Predators

Do you know why we, as humans, are at the top of the current food chain? Not because we’re hard to kill (well, with the exception of Steven Seagal). We’re not; we’re little more than tasty flesh bags waiting for an errant horn or claw to spill our guts like a meat pinata. No, we’re on top simply because we are so absurdly good at killing things ourselves. A good offense, as they say, is the best de-LOOK THERE’S A DUCK! MURDER IT!

We are simply too smart and too well-armed for any wild animal to hunt. Now consider the poor zombie. It lacks every single advantage that has kept humanity from being eaten to extinction. It wanders around in the open, it can’t use weapons, it can’t think or use strategy. It doesn’t even have the sense of self preservation to run and hide when it’s in danger. And, it’s made entirely out of food. It’s easy prey for any animal that wants it.

If you’re saying, “Sure, but it’s not like my city is full of bears that can come eat all the zombies,” you need to think smaller. Insects are a major pain in the ass for living humans, and in some cases, being able to swat away flies and having an immune system is the only thing keeping us from having our eyes and tongues eaten out by maggots. Zombies in any part of the world with a fly problem are going to be swarming with maggots in short order, meaning that most of their soft tissues will be infested, and their eyes will be very quickly useless.

Not so disgusting now, are they? OK, yeah, but show a little respect.

We’ll scale up a bit: In America alone, we have bears, wolves, coyotes and cougars, all of which can put well-armed, thinking, fast-moving humans on the menu, if the conditions are right. To most predators, the “right conditions” are when the animal is weak or infirm, or otherwise generally unable to defend themselves, like a walking corpse. Hell, just think of the millions of stray dogs out there who’ll quickly learn that zombies are an easy meal.

Now imagine zombie hordes wandering Africa. Between lions and cape buffalo (and hippos, and rhinos, and elephants), we’d finally have a disease that Africa is better suited than the rest of the world to defend itself against.

#6.

They Can’t Take the Heat

It’s generally accepted by zombie experts that they’re going to continue to rot, even as they shamble around the streets. What the movies fail to convey, however, is the gruesome yet strangely hilarious effect the hot sun has on a rotting corpse.

The first concern is putrefaction. Thanks to the plethora of bacteria we use in our colon for digesting plant matter, called gut flora, our bodies are ripe for decay the second our heart stops. Since heat speeds the growth of bacteria (which are plenty happy to start feasting on you once your immune system is no longer a concern) the zombie’s got a looming expiration date the very second it turns.

Dead bodies bloat because of the gases created by the bacteria, meaning that in warmer areas even Abercrombie Zombies are going to start getting fat in the first few days. After a few weeks of this, the nasty, bloated zombie army is going to start doing something that is simultaneously the most awesome and disturbing thing a zombie can do: they will start exploding (CAUTION! Pictures!). The warm, moist conditions in the tropical and subtropical parts of the world (or even just summer in the temperate parts) speeds this condition, meaning a July zombie outbreak pretty much anywhere would be over in a few weeks just by virtue of the rampaging monsters bursting like rancid meat balloons.

At the other end of the heat spectrum is dry heat. If you’re in Phoenix or the Sahara when the apocalypse hits, the zombies might begin to mummify in the blazing sun and heat. While the normal symptoms of dehydration are not a concern for a zombie, there is the problem of desiccation. With no reasonable means of replenishing the water in their cells, zombies walking around in the Texas heat all day are going to suffer cell damage due to direct sun exposure to their skin, and thanks to the drying effect wind has, the Southwestern dead will stumble around more and more ineffectively until, at some point, they simply drop and wait for the scavengers to come pick them up for the annual Slim Jim harvest.

So they’d better hope the outbreak happens during the winter, right? Well…

#5.

They Can’t Handle the Cold

Zombies are dead meat. No arguing that; it’s their one defining characteristic. But everybody focuses on that “dead” part like it’s such a huge deal. They often forget about the “meat.” Do you know what else is dead meat? Steak, hamburger, possibly even that red grease mush inside of Taco Bell food.

Look at it.

When flesh is alive, it’s got all sorts of defense systems to keep it that way. When it’s dead, you have to throw it away in about a week even if you seal it up in plastic and keep it at a carefully modulated temperature. Now, your first inclination may be to think of cold as dead meat’s friend, after all, the surest way to defeat that week-long deadline is to freeze steak, keeping it fresh for months. But don’t forget: Unregulated cold does awful shit to formerly living things. If you live far enough north, the zombie apocalypse will probably work itself out the first time it tries to go outside. The first zombie-killer is the simple fact that the human body is mostly water, and water freezes. Once the temperature drops to freezing (or near it with a high wind chill), zombies will become significantly more rigid.

No word on them transforming into snow monsters.

After enough exposure, a dead body is going to be frozen solid and not chasing down any screaming victims, no matter how delicious and Rascal Scooter-bound they might be. It’s also safe to assume that zombies wandering around in a wintry wonderland are not going to be wrapped air-tight in plastic like we do with food, so freezer burn becomes an issue. Seriously. The same thing that ruins your ice cream also ruins the Undead Onslaught. The freezing of the flesh at night, combined with partial thaw during warmer days, then refreezing again sets up the perfect conditions for the onset of freezer burn, which results in the cells dehydrating as water evaporates, even when frozen solid. Freezer burned meat isn’t just dead, it’s destroyed.

#4.

Biting is a Terrible Way to Spread a Disease

Hey, remember that time when that dog got rabies, and then a day later, every single other dog on the continent had it, except for a small band of survivors huddled in a basement? No? That never happened?

Nearly all of the zombie movies agree on one thing: They reproduce like a disease, one that spreads via a bite from the infected (like they have a virus carried by zombie saliva or whatever). But this also means their spread should be subject to the same rules of a normal epidemic, and biting is a shitty way to get an epidemic going.

The successful diseases have some really clever way to invisibly spread from victim to victim. The flu has killed tens of millions because it floats right through the air, the black plague was spread by fleas, etc. Not a single one of them requires the infected to get within biting distance to spread their infection. Sure, sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS work that way, but that’s only because the infected can pass for the uninfected. Nobody is going to be having sex with a zombie.

Though Google Image Search does turn up a large volume of zombie porn

But let’s say there is an outbreak, like if one zombie was able to bite 30 people in the crowd at an Insane Clown Posse concert before they figured out it wasn’t part of the show. It’s not like mankind is just utterly confused about what to do when an infection breaks out. In America you have the Center for Disease Control (CDC,) who don’t tend to fuck around. Seriously, it’s on their business cards.

Remember the SARS outbreak? That originated in China. The CDC and the World Health Organization put the clamps down on international travel the second it was found to have spread to North America. Flights were grounded, travel between borders was locked tight and only 43 people on the entire continent died.

No one was overlooked.

With zombieism, they don’t even have to solve the mystery about how it’s transmitted. It’s that guy biting people. Shoot him in the head.

6 Signs You’re About to be Attacked by Zombies

#6.

Your first instinct during a crisis is to go to your mall.

As seen in:

Dawn of the Dead (original and remake), Dead Rising

Why it’s a sign:

Imagine a horde of zombies swarming down the main street of your town. Where do you go? If the nearest military base comes to mind, you’re probably OK. If you’re having trouble deciding between J. Crew and Sbarro … well, the good news is, you’re going to find the rest of this article extremely informative.

That’s because there are two types of people in this world: those who think of malls as grossly unsafe places to seek shelter during a zombie apocalypse, where the undead masses could hide out in clothes racks and toy bins and where glass doors serve as a flimsy barrier between them and the undead hordes outside. And then there are people like you, who were put on this earth to get attacked by zombies while helping deliver a subtle anti-consumerist commentary.

#5.

You’ve just said or done something that would make it ironic if zombies attacked.

As seen in:

Night of the Living Dead, Diary of the Dead

Why it’s a sign:

Don’t be fooled by their barely functioning nervous system and shambling gait, Zombies have a devastating sense of timing. And if there’s one thing they appreciate more than brains, it’s dramatic irony. So if you’re walking through a graveyard with a woman who’s scared of the undead, you should avoid putting on your most sarcastic spooky voice and saying “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.” For whatever reason, sarcasm sounds like a dinner bell to zombies.

She’s not reacting to your devastating sarcastic/spooky voice.

Zombies are incredibly patient. You can go your whole life avoiding any zombie irony–never dressing up as a zombie on Halloween, skipping all the “dead people are dead and never coming back” parties your friends throw every Easter. No rush. Take as long as you want. Zombies aren’t busy. They’ll just be chilling out under a thin dusting of suspiciously loose soil. And the second you slip up and do something that would make a zombie attack the least bit ironic, like say, starring in a zombie movie, they will be on your ass with a quickness.

#4.

The hospital you just woke up in is completely empty.

As seen in:

28 Days Later, the comic series The Walking Dead, Resident Evil

Why it’s a sign:

If you find yourself falling into either of the above groups, you should probably avoid spending time unconscious in a hospital bed. In a zombie apocalypse, nothing’s more embarrassing than walking around asking stuff like, “What the fuck happened to the world?” The people who’ve had to deal with this shit for weeks will just roll their eyes, and generally act like you’re the stupidest son of a bitch in town not mumbling the word “Braaaaains.”

That’s because the deeper people get into a zombie crisis, the more everyone starts acting like total assholes. So skipping two weeks of consciousness doesn’t make for the smoothest of transitions. Your new friends got to ease their way into the apocalypse, whereas you just rolled out of a warm bed, directly into a frigid pool of cannibalism and back-sass.

NOTE: This of course assumes that you survive the two weeks in your hospital bed serving as a man shaped hot plate for your brains. For whatever reason, this is generally a safe assumption.

#3.

You are doing something unorthodox in a graveyard.

As seen in:

Return of the Living Dead, Dead Alive

Why it’s a sign:

Most people like to do their dancing and fighting in night clubs, and save the graveyard for more appropriate activities like being dead. But you don’t play by those rules, and well, neither do zombies.

Listen, you just never know when, as you’re taking a run-of-the-mill naked dance break in the middle of a graveyard, radioactive toxins will rain down and cause the people in the graves to rise up and begin shouting “Braaaains!”

#2.

You never use the word “zombie.”

As not heard in:

Every single zombie movie ever, and mentioned in Shaun of the Dead.

Why it’s a sign:

Let me set up a scenario for you. You’re coming home from work one evening. You pull into your driveway and pop out of your car to see your now-dead friends walking up the street, with the intention to eat you. What do you call them? If you said “them” or “things,” then, well, that isn’t a far-fetched scenario so much as it’s a glimpse of your future. Make no mistake: With the exception of the aforementioned metatextual zombie movie, nobody in a zombie movie has ever seen one. If this page is in your browser history, it’s probably time to be scared.

#1.

Your girlfriend, pet, brother or parents are zombies.

As seen in:

Return of the Living Dead 3, Day of the Dead. 28 Days Later. Night of the Living Dead

Why it’s a sign:

You know, I really shouldn’t need to explain this one.

Dead Bride Makeup Tutorial

Female Vampire Makeup Tutorial

 

8 Zombie Apocalypse Survival Strategies (For Zombies)

#2. Sex

Your sex drive will drop off considerably following zombification, primarily due to the lack of blood circulating in your nether regions.

Getty
“Blaaaaaargh. (I just kind of feel like cuddling right now actually, if that’s OK with you.)”

It won’t disappear entirely however, and you may find yourself feeling familiar and confusing urges again, perhaps when gazing at a gaping wound in the torso of a lovely zombie of your preferred gender.

Safe sex is critical, but not, interestingly, because of the risk of infectious disease (definitely there, but irrelevant). Remember that both of your bodies are slowly crumbling, so be gentle, and focus on pleasing only your sturdier appendages. You will also be substantially less flexible, so don’t try anything too creative. Try a zombie-modified variant of the missionary position, which is like regular missionary position, but standing, arms outstretched so that the two of you are kind of grappling with your torsos still several feet apart. This is not in any way satisfying, but given the tremendous gas pain you’re feeling at all times, that wasn’t really an option anyways — also note that this position will mitigate the chance of orgasm, which would be profoundly uncomfortable for all involved.

Getty
For an idea of what this sounds like, jam a sausage into a wheel of Camembert.

#1. Retirement Planning

The unnatural lifespan of a zombie will vary anywhere between six months to several years, depending on how well they take care of themselves — assuming you trick yourself into eating enough vegetables, you’ll probably slot in to the upper end of that range. And if that’s the case, ask yourself whether you want to spend your golden months shuffling around, competing with younger, fitter zombies for food? Them just tripping you up, and laughing at you and the music that you like, and using new slang that you’re unfamiliar with.

Getty
“Vlaaaaaaaargh. (OMG! LOL)”

That would suck like a gaping chest wound, so make sure to plan for your future and build up a nest egg. Capture and pen some humans in a safe place, being careful not to feed on them until you retire. Then, taking into account inflation and the reproduction rate for humans in captivity, you should be able to live off that supply for the rest of your unlife. If you don’t want to go to that trouble, Zombie Mutual Funds are a sensible way to pool your resources with other investors. ZMFs are run by experienced professionals who manage humans in a collective fund, allowing their population to grow at sustainable rates. There is a cost to this of course, so be sure to do your own due diligence prior to joining a fund — look for funds with a track record of steady human growth, and with low expense fees (ZMERs).

Conclusion

Being a zombie is not all fun and games. You’ll be in constant pain, always hungry, usually disoriented and you will fall down — a lot. Meanwhile your primary food source love, love, loves, shooting you in the face, and will even probably make up little games surrounding it. Finally there is a non-trivial chance your genitals will fall off.

“Blaaaaaaaargh. (Oh no. My beans.)”

With this guide … well … all those things will probably still happen to you. Sorry. But some of the time horrible things won’t happen to you, and in those times you will be zombieing like hell, head intact and just killing it in all aspects of unlife. Blaaaaaaaargh! You’ll live like a zombie boss, or at least you will before the human military drops napalm on you and your friends and the little grave you buried your genitals in.

8 Zombie Apocalypse Survival Strategies (For Zombies)

#4. Romance

The longing to pair off with a kindred soul has lasted throughout human history, and there’s no reason to think it won’t survive the transition to inhuman history, even if the souls are no longer exactly present and everyone’s a bit stickier.

Mark Marek
With luck, your nose will be the first thing to rot off.

The biggest challenge with finding said soulless-mate will be the communication difficulties — “Blaaaaaaaargh” can mean both “I am for you, always” and “I have tremendous gas pain.” You’re also going to be cut off from the technological advantages today’s humans have, with their dating web sites and sexting and teledildonics. Instead, you’re going to be meeting most of your potential mates the old fashioned way — through social circles and peers. It will be more than a little bit like how they dated in pre-industrial days, so if you have the time prior to zombification, spend some time around Amish communities to get a feel for how that plays out. Don’t tell them what you’re there researching zombie life though — the Amish already have a poor impression of outsiders. Also don’t mention the teledildonics thing either — same deal.

Finally, because you never know when you’ll shuffle upon that special someone, make a point of keeping yourself presentable looking. Always try and keep some fresh blood on your shirtfront to make yourself look successful. Mind your posture, keeping it hunched and stiff looking. And tear your clothes strategically to reveal your most suggestively rotted bits.

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Hot. Well, actually cold and clammy. But you get our meaning.

#3. Job Hunting

Even with civilization crumbling around you, remember that you are still part human. There is a deep and powerful selfishness built into your modified DNA, and it is probably inevitable that zombies will eventually get around to the business of business. In the later stages of a zombie apocalypse, you can expect the most dynamic and successful zombies will be gathering, hording and growing precious resources — building human farms essentially. The rich zombies will get richer, and if you can’t be one of them, you’ll want to at least be working for one of them.

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“ZombCorp has a great health plan — your first two jaw replacements are free. And the glass eye copay is only half a frontal lobe.”

The job application and interview process will be pretty informal, and will probably consist of a short conversation and a grappling contest. Bringing a resume is advisable — but remember that the typical zombie resume will be very short, as your pre-zombie education and experience will be meaningless in this new world order. Focus on your quantifiable zombie-specific achievements — number of humans eaten, barricades demolished, malls sacked, that sort of thing. It will of course be impossible to write any of this down, but taking the effort to smear a bloody stump of a finger on a piece of paper will show you have professionalism, in the exact same way that it doesn’t currently do that at all in the human world.

8 Zombie Apocalypse Survival Strategies (For Zombies)

#6. Social Networking

Science has proven that zombies work better in teams and you’ll find your odds of making it in a dying world will be substantially improved if you form connections with your peers. Having friends around is useful for swarming, as well as for their ability to break your fall when you take a spill — you’ll be taking a lot of spills.

Mark Marek Photography
Zombified children have poor centers of balance and are an excellent way to bridge gaps in staircases or ford small bodies of water.

To find friends, attend places where there are likely to be other zombies — malls, deserted gas stations, cemeteries — and mingle. Don’t worry if you’re shy, or have confidence problems — you will have similar interests as these unpeople. Simply start a conversation politely by saying “Blaaarrragh.” Listen attentively and gauge the other zombie’s response — depending on whether they say, “Blaaaaaarrrgh,” or shuffle a bit to the left, you’ll be able to see whether this zombie wants to be a friend (both those actions indicate that yes, he does). Repeat as necessary until you are popular, or the hunger gets too much.

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“Blaaaaaaaargh. (You guys want to do something, or just hang out?)”

#5. Self Defense

The natural enemy of the zombie is the human, and those little pink bastards haven’t made it to the top of the food chain for nothing. In the early days of a zombie breakout, most humans will be pretty soft and doughy, and pose no particular challenge. But as time passes, only the toughest, stringiest humans will remain — and they will be much more heavily armed. Not only will they be harder to chew, the more aggressive of them will begin fighting back.

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Above: Considerably more difficult than Pizza Hut.

The most important tip is to travel in a group, as there is safety in numbers. When dealing with particularly ornery humans, try not to be the first zombie at the scene — these over achievers rarely make it through feeding time with their heads intact. Hanging back like this is technically abusing your friends’ trust in you, but it turns out that not having a soul makes this a lot easier to live with. Remember: a head is preferable to a soul.

That’s another thing — the head. For some sick, twisted reason, humans love attacking zombie heads, and you can expect them to take no end of perverse pleasure in aiming for yours. If at all possible, wear a helmet. Even something as simple as a colander can be enough to offer some protection — perhaps against someone armed with a slingshot, or some uncooked pasta.

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The holes will also allow any of your head fluids to drain through.

But don’t get over-confident with a helmet in place, as humans are extremely adaptable, and will instead focus on your other weak spots. As noted zombie-defense experts the Wu-Tang Clan have observed, remember to protect ya’ neck as well.