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Survive a Zombie Apocalypse - Wired How-To Wiki:

Wired How-To just posted a new article on how to survive the zombie apocalypse. Here are some of their suggestions:

One tempting option is to go out there with a flamethrower. Zombies may have a natural aversion to fire, you should be able to ignite several of them with one burst, and it looks spectacular – there’s a video of a demonstration here. However, if you check the specifications it has some serious drawbacks. The U.S. Army’s M2-2 flamethrower weighed about seventy pounds, and is effective out to around fifty yards, but the big limitation is ammunition: a fuel tank holding 18 liters of gasoline, enough for approximately five bursts of two seconds each.

This is actually good advice. A couple of really good, well maintained guns and a plentiful supply of ammo should be all you need to dispatch a horde of the shambling undead. The author actually points this out in the article with this proviso:

Unlike living humans, stopping power counts for nothing as far as zombies go; it’s all about shot placement. (And reliability – take at least one back-up gun in case you get a jam or run out of ammo at a bad time.) Anything larger than a .22 will do the job, so long as you’re capable of putting a round squarely though the head. And this is very much harder than you think.

Popping a cap in a zombie’s ass may slow it down, but you really have to scramble its eggs. Put one in the brain. Go out to the firing range and see how hard it is. As with everything in this life, practice makes perfect.

More:

Human factors are probably much more important than hardware. Stay cool, and keep moving. Bring a friend or three, so long as you can count on them not to scream, panic or cause friendly-fire incidents. Zombies are liable to come from all directions at the same time; you don’t get bonus points for killing more of them, so just do what you have to in order to get to safety. And watch out for the ones that are just playing dead. (Actually, they really are dead… but you know what I mean.)

What they’re saying here kids; don’t play Wild Bill Hickock or Annie Oakley and try to dispatch all the zombies in the immediate area. Thinning the herd rather than balls to the wall shambler genocide is way more effective when trying to get to safety.

Of course, the article only mentions the kind of zombies featured in the George A. Romero classic “…of the Dead” series, but not the ones the “28″ movies. Of course I’m referring to the now classic “28 Days Later,” and its superb sequel, “28 Weeks Later.”

In the 28s, Great Britain had an outbreak of the Rage Virus. From the SciFiPedia:

The (Rage) virus is an engineered strain of ebola designed to inhibit violent behavior but ultimately proved to have the opposite effect, leading to extremely violent behavior in primates and an overwhelming urge to spread the disease which is transmitted through bodily fluids such as saliva and blood.

The disease itself is not deadly but the victim’s lack of interest in food eventually leads to starvation. Symptoms of the virus include violent behavior, muscular spasms in the limbs, blood shot eyes and vomiting blood. The infected never act in self preservation and are driven to infect or kill others through biting. As they are not “undead” as in other zombie films, the infected can be killed by conventional means though killing an infected person may be made more difficult by their adrenaline enhanced strength, endurance, and disregard for pain and their own well being.

So, zombie-like enhanced humans who never stop, whose goal is to infect others by biting them. Whew. The good news is you can kill ragers conventionally (the helicopter scene in “28 Weeks Later” comes immediately to mind). The bad news is that hitting a running target, even with a body shot, is much harder than hitting a slower moving undead one. The task here, as I see it, is to coop one’s self up for the duration of the outbreak. You may then wait out the seven days to five weeks it’s going to take for the ragers to die of dehydration or starvation. That means having a place to go that is cut off from the rest of the world, shored up tightly and armed to the teeth. Have lots of guns and blunt, flailing type weapons.

Well there you have it. If you have any other suggestions, comment.

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