Are You Ready for the Zombie Apocalypse? (Part 1)

Experts say there’s a one thousand percent greater chance of there being a zombie apocalypse now than a hundred years ago. Will you be ready?

Here are the results of a poll. What will you do?

This could happen to you

It’s really really quiet when you wake up. The alarm clock is dark. Obviously, the power has gone off again, and you think, “What excuse is the electric company going to come up with, this time?” It hasn’t even been especially windy. You go to the bathroom, then come back into your bed.

You start to smell smoke. That gets you up. You look out the window, and see people walking slowly down the street. But there aren’t any cars on the street, and it’s really really quiet. Hold on, there’s a car down the block that’s on fire, but the people aren’t paying any attention to it. That’s strange. Why wouldn’t they be walking toward the scene, or even running away from it? They must be in shock.

From your neighbor’s front porch, his pit bull Brutus starts barking. The people stop milling around aimlessly and start walking towards your neighbor’s house. You notice that they’re walking quite slowly: some are actually shuffling, as if there’s something wrong with their legs. You hear your neighbor Vincent yelling at his dog from inside: nothing unusual about that. Then he opens the front door. The dog runs in, barking loudly.

By now, there are a lot of people approaching his house. They’re pushing through his bushes, treading on his manicured lawn, and crushing his lawn ornaments. They knock over his garden gnome. Vincent starts to yell at the crowd, but just as he opens his mouth, he closes it again and slams the door shut. He actually looked frightened. Vincent? You’ve never seen him back off before: last spring he shouted for five minutes at the plumbers who messed up a few inches of his lawn, when they dragged your old boiler out of the basement. Brutus continues to bark inside. Something about those people scared Vincent.

You start looking more closely at these people. They’re stumbling, falling, and stepping on each other, never making any effort to step around them, almost as if they aren’t seeing anything except Vincent’s front door. “It’s a zombie movie!,” you think, laughing at yourself.

Then the people start banging on his door, on the walls and on the front windows. You hear glass breaking and the dog’s barks grow louder. Something makes you think you should stay out of sight, so you draw your curtains closed.

[Update: 3/5/2015 Alex Alemi of Cornell University has identified the best and worst places to go in case of a Zombie Apocalypse.

To be continued….