How would you survive a Zombie Apocalypse.

[The Vortex Empire]

You are informed by an Omnipotent Being(Q, etc.), that in exactly 30 days, 90% of the human race will be infected with the Zombie virus, and transform into zombies. Who becomes a zombie is entirely random. However, only 1 in 10 of your friends/family will be infected.

You may use these 30 days to prepare in whatever way you wish. You may only use the resources of yourself and anyone you convince to aid you. You may only move up to 20 miles away from your current location.

The zombies are Dawn of the Dead style zombies. They can run as fast as a human can, and can only be killed by destroying the central nervous system. They will rot away in 6 months after infection. The infection can be transmitted by infected body fluids entering your body, so even a single drop of zombie blood entering a wound will infect you.

So, denizens of SDN, how would you survive a Zombie Apocalypse?

[Chardok]

sell my car and all my posessions, buy a shotgun, AR-15, 5000 rounds of .223, 1000 shotgun shells, an old Ford 4X4 and an old 4-horse trailer which I fill with Non-perishable food and camping supplies (Axes, hammers, nails, shovels, pickaxes, tents, about 50 cases of MRE's, sleeping bags, Vitamins, iodine tablets, flints, some bowie knives, canned goods, powdered milk, etc.) and head out to Utah, into the mojave. Drive on out until I find a nice, quiet spot by a stream, under some willow trees about ten miles from any roads, and set up camp. I chose a stream because there's little chance of a ginormous flash-flood in the event of big-time rain and with a toddler, I'll need a ready source of water; and, near as I can figure it, the best place to be in a zombie apocalypse of ANY kind is a nice, open field with big, exposed avenues of approach.

It'd be rough for awhile until we get the campsite situated, but being so far away from anything resembling a road (and thus a food source for the zombies), my greatest worry would not be flesh-eating monsters, but the odd scorpion or rattlesnake. I'll take that any day.

[weemadando]

Getting 30 days warning? I load up my car with supplies and day after day shuttle more and more stuff to the most remote and defensible location I can find. This will likely be a nice remote farmhouse/shearers accommodation up in the highlands that I can rent.

Supplies would include food, water, petrol, batteries, survival gear, lots and lots of heavy duty cyclone fencing, hardwood, starpickets and more. I would also contract installation of a large rainwater tank and sand/charcoal filter purification system if there wasn't already one there.

I then have to break it to my fiance that the wedding probably won't be happening due to zombie apocalypse.

I move to the new site a few days before the outbreak and spend that time finishing construction and turning the building into Fort Zombie.

[Bounty]

head out to Utah,

You may only move up to 20 miles away from your current location.

You can park that four-horse trailer down the street.

Less than 20 miles from here, there's an intact medieval water fortress with a restored, working drawbridge. It has cellars that be used to cold-store supplies, it sits smack-bang in the middle of an artificial lake, has 20ft walls and if all else fails, a keep that's been specifically designed to allow a small group of defenders to hold back an arbitrarily large group of attackers with melee weapons.

So unless they zombies learn how to swim, manage to scale sheer walls with rocks being dropped at them or bring their own seige engines, I'd say me and a small group of people (hell, a large group, if consumables allow it) have a fair chance of riding this one out.

[weemadando]

Oh a 20 mile limitation?

DAMN. I'll aim to find somewhere defensible in the middle of fucking Melbourne. Most likely without any luck.

[commander owen]

and right next to the mountain as a bonus. and have a cabelas with in twenty miles, so i stock up on surival gear, guns, ammo, get a loan, buy a sherman, and get it re-armmed. also buy a trailer to attach to the tank, get ammo for the tank, get some friend to buy trailers, trucks, and survial gear, food, guns, ammo, and barbed wire. go up the A.F. Cannyon and take mutual dell, and fortify any choke points with I.E.D.s (which there has to be some designs on the Net) and have a large fence placed around the compound, place the tank in the middle by the trailers and trucks. and ocasionaly send some snipers to the mouth of the canyon to eliminate the occasional strageler. there is also a stream that goes through mutual dell, so i would need to purchese water purifiers and filters.
that should be it.


(Still Sorry )

[Noble Ire]

I suppose my best bet would be to load up on a few firearms from the local gun shop, long with a generator, some surivial equiptment, and a sufficiently large supply of food and water, and then transport it all the the uppermost floors and rooftop of the city closest to me. Leaving would pose a problem, but it would likely be easy enough to secure, with space enough for several dozen people. Of course, I would actually have to convince those people that the threat was real, get enough money from the for preperations, and find a suitable building withot attract undue attention from the public. Zombies might not be able to break into a properly safeguarded redoubt, but panicked people probably could.

Were these "normal", shambling Zombies, a more open setting might be better, but since these undead can run, I'd rather be sealed up as tightly as possible.

[Gandalf]

DAMN. I'll aim to find somewhere defensible in the middle of fucking Melbourne. Most likely without any luck.

You could probably camp out atop a block of flats or someone's roof.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Dawn of the Dead zombies were physically rotting by the end of the movie. So I find a nice, isolated farm's bomb shelter, stock up on canned food, bottled water and vitamin tablets, and wait for 2 years.

[Xenophobe3691]

Let's see...Living by UCF...I'd probably go to the nearest Wal-Mart, buy a ton of guns and ammo, canned food to last me two years WITH variety, and hole up in the Engineering building.

Too easy to make weapons there...

[Stark]

I read the eight million other threads exactly like this one and, through the power of deductive reasoning, try to understand why nerds are so fascinated with 'lolz zombies'. Syllogism > zombie.

[chitoryu12]

Buy or steal a house boat and float it out into the ocean. Don't drop anchor. Billions of zombies means that some will be on the ocean floor and will likely climb the anchor. Bring plenty of extra gas and food. Primary weapons will an M14 rifle, set to semi-auto so no ammo is wasted and an M21 rifle with an infrared nightvision scope, to allow for ammo sharing between rifles. Backup would be .357 caliber revolvers with aimpoint sights. Enough ammo, fuel, and food as can be carried without signifigantly weighing down the ship. Hey, it's an apocalypse. If you have to, steal everything you need. Give every person a suicide pill in case their infection/devouring is inevitable. Keeping the pills locked up would not be an issue. Anyone who wants to kill themselves can simply jump overboard.

[Coyote]

20 mile limit!

Actually, I'd be tempted to stay where I'm at. As mentioned, I have good relations with my neighbors and we can fortify our area fairly well if need be. It is also nice that, within my 20 mile limit (actually, about 5 miles) is my Army Reserve post and its ready access to armored vehicles, as well as a crane and truck I can use to bring in barbed wire, Jersey barriers, etc.

There's sufficient open land with just two of my neighbors that we could grow some subsistence gardens, get some chickens, and live fairly well, under the circumstances. I've already got plenty of guns but with 30 days notice I can max out over $20,000.00 worth of credit cards and buy enough ammo and survival rations for the neighborhood.

[Tasoth]

I die. Seriously, if one in ten becomes a zombie, in america alone, assuming a total population of 300 million, that's 30 million zombies, a portion of those cropping up on military bases when no one is expecting it. Assuming I manage to survive the rising date with a good portion of family and friends, I now have to scrounge for food to feed said members of my family and friends for six months. On top of this, raiders and bandits will have to be fended off because, well guess what, when shit goes bad, people get worse. Now what of water? Ten to one, with in days of the rise, maybe weeks if we're lucky, water lines to got shit, as well as sewage. Now that means we have to struggle to find water, and it being the summer months, that means keep from dehydrating without AC that would lose power from the dying power facilities.

What else goes wrong? Well there could be a rash of sickness, and unless we have a pharmacist or doctor, we won't be able to treat it with the right medications. Dead there. 3-4 months into the nightmare and winter hits. The cold will claim people alone since there are no nice, heated shelter to run too. Fires will attract the dead and the cut throats and ammunition is probably going to be low by now. Not to mention the cold will probably slow down the decay of the zombies. So, assuming we make it through a hot summer and winter without dying of starvation and lack of water, we go back to scrounging in the spring. With zombies about. And since no one in urban areas probably has an inkling of how to farm enough to support a large number of people, the scrounging for food eventually fails and we die.

Of course that's assuming the government just doesn't squat on above high density population areas and drop fire bombs or nukes.

But assuming I'm to survive, here's how. My concept of reality is going to shatter. I've just ran into a god like being with precognition. I'm going to be fighting the walking dead. My whole world is going to go down in flames. What comes back is going to be less human. I will make death coasters, steam powered robots and wonderous weapons and I will take the world by force after the rise.

I broke the rules, I know, but it's better then dying.

[Lone_Prodigy]

I die. Seriously, if one in ten becomes a zombie, in america alone, assuming a total population of 300 million, that's 30 million zombies, a portion of those cropping up on military bases when no one is expecting it.

No, it's 90%, so 270 million zombies appearing overnight. Most of those military personnel would wake up surrounded by the undead.

[Rye]

Drive to reebok Stadium. Get inside. Wait out zombie apocalypse.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

I die. Seriously, if one in ten becomes a zombie, in america alone, assuming a total population of 300 million, that's 30 million zombies, a portion of those cropping up on military bases when no one is expecting it.

No, it's 90%, so 270 million zombies appearing overnight. Most of those military personnel would wake up surrounded by the undead.

Indeed. With a dead:living ratio of 9:1 from the start, before any sort of response could be formulated, I wouldn't be surprised if the only survivors of this apocalypse were a few SD.Net members and maybe 5% of those isolated Mountain men living alone in the wilderness. It'll be a brave new world after the Living Dead collapse, that's for damn sure.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Ghettor edit: In fact, this is a scenario which could conceivably end in the complete annihilation of Homo Spaiens from the planet, even if that means that it happens after a few generations of inbreeding between families that survived culminating in madness, sterility and the passing of our race from the annals of history.

[Chardok]

Forgot the 20 mile limit. Well, then, I head up to the hill country. Still about the same situation. Lots of wilderness around San Antonio. I just find a nice ranch, drive out into the middle of it with muh truck and the same gear and enjoy the view.

[Chardok]

Anyway, Dawn of the dead zombies or not, it isn't as if we're being attacked by zombie commandos who use cover and concealment. I still maintain the best place it be is a nice open field with plenty of clear avenues of approach. My AR-15 Is more than sufficient to pick off the odd wandering monster or two that comes out to my campsite looking for fresh meat, and if it gets too hairy, I can jump in ye olde 4X4 and relocate. Highly defensible positions are nice and all, but in the movies people get trapped and eaten in those defensible positions, so it's best to have any one of 360 degrees to pick a direction to move in without hinderance.

[Pulp Hero]

I don't have a plan yet, but some quick thoughts:

You require roughly 2 liters of water per day to stay healthy.
That is roughly 360 liters of water for six months. I would not trust ANY water sources not machine packed after Z-day, because of possible contamination (zombie related or just due to the breakdown of infastructure).

You are going to want about 1500 calories per day (closer to 2,000 for most, unless you're used to fewer calories.) Optimally MREs are the best choice, at about 1,300 calories per pack. That is 180 MREs or 8 boxes. MREs are light for what they provide, last, and can be cooked on their own.

Basic sanitary items are needed for a six month haul.

Medical supplies.

Cell phones are probably going to be down, so high end walkie-talkies as used by hikers are need with replacement batteries..

===
I will definately look for a close by, easily defendable area to hole up in with all of my supplies, however I will also have a rucksack/personal gear ready if I get over-run, need to leave:

Rucksack("C" or civilian equivalent) with:
-wooby (lightweight blanket)
-rain poncho.
-baby wipe pack.
-toothbrush, electric razor w/extra batteries, bug repellent, goldbond, signal mirror.
-socks, four pair, packed airtight in TABS bags.
-spandex underwear, four pair, packed airtight in TABS bags.
-Gerber tool, hobo-tool, electric tape, mono-filiment tape.
-extra batteries.
-12 MRE entree packs.
-4 magazines 5.56mm
-Spraypant can (to spray messages to other survivors)
-Flashlight
-extra glasses

LBE with:
-Four 1 qt canteens.
-Two magazine pouches w/2 5.56mm each.
-Fixed blade knife.
-Gerber tool.
-Mini light.
-Map of area.
-another set of extra glasses

Also:
ACUs
Glasses
Neoprene gloves (gloves are a must)
Camelback
Zeroed AR15, unless I can get an M4 (there is a weapons locker that doesn't look too secure around here.) with magazine.
1911 .45 pistol.

[Pulp Hero]

and right next to the mountain as a bonus. and have a cabelas with in twenty miles, so i stock up on surival gear, guns, ammo, get a loan, buy a sherman, and get it re-armmed. also buy a trailer to attach to the tank, get ammo for the tank, get some friend to buy trailers, trucks, and survial gear, food, guns, ammo, and barbed wire. go up the A.F. Cannyon and take mutual dell, and fortify any choke points with I.E.D.s (which there has to be some designs on the Net) and have a large fence placed around the compound, place the tank in the middle by the trailers and trucks. and ocasionaly send some snipers to the mouth of the canyon to eliminate the occasional strageler. there is also a stream that goes through mutual dell, so i would need to purchese water purifiers and filters.
that should be it.


(Still Sorry )

You're going to buy a sherman tank? That's the plan? And get it re-armed, who the fuck is going to re-arm a tank for you? And 75mm rounds can't possibly be cheap, or common, or legal.

I.E.D.s are easy to make if you have explosives. You could attempt to cook you own, but without experience with HE all you are doing is saving yourself the trouble of living through zombi-pocalypse.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Anyway, Dawn of the dead zombies or not, it isn't as if we're being attacked by zombie commandos who use cover and concealment. I still maintain the best place it be is a nice open field with plenty of clear avenues of approach. My AR-15 Is more than sufficient to pick off the odd wandering monster or two that comes out to my campsite looking for fresh meat, and if it gets too hairy, I can jump in ye olde 4X4 and relocate. Highly defensible positions are nice and all, but in the movies people get trapped and eaten in those defensible positions, so it's best to have any one of 360 degrees to pick a direction to move in without hinderance.

I agree that the best defense in this case is isolation - stay away from any major population densities, where zombies -> people, and you'll be fine. It's not like the zombies will begin moving out in concentric circles to locate prey, and with 90% of the population going Zombie on the first day, there will be no major exoduses of people from the city to worry about.

[Baal]

Not being a Zombie expert I have a few questions.

Zombies like to eat people but do they HAVE to eat people? Can a Zombie starve and die for good? Because if they can then with 90% of humanity zombied there isnt going to be enough food for them after the first 24 hours. Hell 90% of those 90% are going to be Zombies who never ever have a chance to munch on a nice tasty human.

Also one can expect very little real damage to cities or buildings. There just arent enough humans left at only 10% around fighting said zombies to do much damage.

Finally with a 9 to 1 zombie ratio there is going to be food and water EVERYWHERE to eat. I get thirsty Me and my buddies head on over to the nearest 7-11 kill a few donzen shambling indiots and then load up on all that nice undisturbed bottled water sitting on the shelf.

So in the sense of feeding myself the sheer number of zombies you created and how quickly you created them will be a big help. It means that there will be VERY few humans out there breaking into the Walmarts and Costcos to get the supplies needed to survive.

Hell to make things simple I may just barricade myself along with my family right inside a Costco and live it large for as long as I can. As long as I secure the place to begin with and keep all the gates locked we are going to have a hell of a time running out of food in a place like that. Will also have nice beds, sheets, clothes, etc. The only thing missing will be hot water for the showers but with all the bottled water around we can spar some to keep ourselves clean.

So go run into the mountains alone. My family and I along with the friends I trust the most are moving into Costco, reinforcing all the gates and then breaking into the DVD collections they sell for something to watch for as long as the power stays on.

[Tasoth]

Okay, with ninety percent of the population, winter claims the human race faster. Okay, maybe not the entirety of the human race, but most first world nations. The scary thing about zombie apocalypse scenarios is that 1st world nations are too soft and pampered to actually survive them. We rely heavily on power sent to our houses, water pumped through pipelines and gasoline. Without these amenities, we die fast. Take a look at our current generation of youngster. How many think they could actually survive six months without things being handed to them? How about five years? Yeah, you can pick up water bottles, but have you look at them? They have expirations dates? You plan on depending on them for that long? What happens when you drink all the water in the city? Cheetoes and Corn chips do not a balanced diet make. Someone suggested on eating only 1500-2000 calories a day. Do you know how hard that is in a first world nation, where food flows freely? I'd tear through the MREs in a forth of the time they should last me out of boredom. Unless your from a family of farmers or live in an area where you scratch a living from nothing, there is no hope. Especially with the 20 mile travel limit. The majority of people live on the east or west coast near major urban centers. 20 miles from home still keeps you in one of these urban centers.