You Will Not Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Yeah, you talk a big game, what with your tennis serve and your five minute mile, but not even you will survive the zombie apocalypse. This treatise is to prepare you for the inevitable so you can greet munchy rotten death with delirious glee.

Item the first: You can’t even stop for thirty seconds to give the homeless guy outside the CVS a couple of bucks. If the reason is truly the smell you wax spasmodic about, you won’t last two days in the zombie apocalypse. Everyone living will stink of fear and despair within 72 hours. In a week, we will all have the canned meat and Old E sweats. In a month, we will be coated with our own diarrhea and the gore of at least 12 zombies.

But we will never get used to the smell of the dead. You are not meant to; you are wired to be repulsed by it. Oh, sure, after a while you might disregard it for minutes at a time, but that oppressive odor will linger in your nostrils until the day you die screaming in a puddle of your own fluids.

Item two: You can barely handle insults on social media and rude people at the supermarket. What in God’s name makes you think you can tolerate roving bands of survivors? Sure, some will be polite, for a time. But eventually even the most compassionate former bank manager will bark at you, “Get off your scrawny ass and help me erect a barricade!”

Then Scabs, a former roller derby blogger, will chortle from his can of baked beans, “Heh, I’ve got a barricade she can erect.” And there is no HR to complain to, no officer, no safe space. You will have to figure out how to ignore or engage with Scabs before you lose your mind. You could also light him on fire, if you knew how to start a fire.

Item Three: the last time you picked up a bat was in fifth grade gym, and you have only ever seen guns in movies. You are hosed. You are screwed. If you think you’re Katniss or Daryl and that you’re going to raid a sporting goods store for a crossbow, you are out to lunch. All the actual archers will have already done that, and even if you found one, you don’t know how to use it. You haven’t been to the range. You routinely miss three out of five rubbish bin baskets. What makes you think you can hit a zombie? Or a bad human?

Which leads us to Item four: Bad people. They will be everywhere. You might become one yourself, thanks to your mind snapping from how bleedin’ awful everything is. And the world will be truly awful. Not the awful you think it is now, where people are rude and hurtful, but disease and depravity-ridden awful.

If you can’t or won’t defend yourself, you’re dead. Oh, you kvetch about the Morgan story line on The Walking Dead, but you are Morgan. You really are. Unless you’re a Marine. Then you can disregard this whole thing.

Item Five: You think you are fit because you go to bikram/Soul Cycle/Pilates. Oh sure, you are fit enough to wear Lululemon pants. You are not fit enough to outrun thieves, murderers, and rapists. You are not fit enough to dodge 37 zombies who are milling inside the Target break room you just shimmied into. You also don’t know a martial art no matter how much Tai Bo you watched.

Let’s face it; none of us are going to survive. Even those of us with thicker skins who survive this current world through eye rolls and Twitter blockings will die grizzly, smug deaths. The only ones left will be Marines, two Russians in a fishing boat, the Masai, and Rob Kardashian.


Featured image by Matt Dawson you can check out more of his awesome art here.

Kellie Jane Adan
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