Zombie Warfare Preparation: Immobilize First, Then Go For the Kill

The dead have risen.

With that, they have declared war on the living. No, they did not have a zombie diplomat deliver papers to the head of our government saying that we have irreconcilable differences and will be doing their darndest to annihilate anything with a pulse. They will simply shamble their stinking body over to you and try to eat your brains.

Remember, your opponent is an undead automation that does not need to eat, sleep, breathe, think, or go to the bathroom. Only a kill shot to the head will stop it permanently. Severing its head will not kill a zombie, it simply means that you have a living zombie head souvenir. So, it’s always important destroy and dispose of the zombie’s gray matter – not only to get rid of the zombie, but to also rid yourself any possibility of further contagion. Remember, they may not have a working body, but they do have a working mouth with teeth.

And accidents happen.

I am not the first person to propose zombie combat techniques and I’m certainly not going to be the last, but any reasonable plan in the event of a zombie apocalypse is certainly something you should store in your mind, provided that there is a reasonable, logical action behind it. For example, many of the so-called experts on zombie combat will recommend automatic weapons and flame throwers to be part of your arsenal. I disagree whole heartedly.

Let the idiots go all full metal jacket on an opponent that can pretty much use lead as a vitamin. I prefer to play it smart. If you are engulfed in a zombie apocalypse, you need to think long term. You need to economize. And you need to think of stealth and what you can do without ammo.

Chances are that when a zombie apocalypse happens, you’ll be relatively unprepared.

Really! Let’s remember that up until the incidents of “bath salts” and sudden occurrences of cannibalism on some of the homeless, we all have treated the concept of zombie warfare as fiction. It’s an intellectual exercise that we indulge in when we can’t think of real world battle scenarios of a Soviet invasion on our home soil.

We normally think of what we can do to living opponents which is a matter of some number crunching and use of conventional warfare where we know the exact biological limitations of our enemies. We know that battle with human insurgents are always dependent upon whether that army can be led, bred, and fed.

With zombie warfare, those rules don’t apply because each undead automation has its mission preprogrammed into it and does not require any kind of nutritional fortification or leadership. Its army is raised by either contagion or by thinning out your ranks.

You, as a private citizen, are not going to get any warning about a zombie incursion. The expectation is that the government and the media are not going to tell you anything until it’s too late. So, your first warning will be the stinking undead walker that seems to be focused on you and those scrumptious edible muscles you have. Chances are you’ll be doing your usual business of working, playing, exercising, gardening, or just plain watching TV.

Whatever it is, it will almost certainly NOT be checking your supply of dry goods and making sure your anti-zombie moat is good to go.

Most people do not own guns. Sadly, I’m one of those people. I won’t be the one to tell you to get your Colt 1911 and check your supply of cartridges. And while I am a dead shot, gun play is not my first impulse. As a home owner, I will need to work with what I have around the house first. That includes shovels, hammers, axes, butcher knives, machetes, fishing nets, rocks, and fireplace pokers.

Also, you will vary your battle plans in accordance to the season. Summer strategies may not be as easily implemented as some things that you can do in the winter or snow settings.

In any season, my battle plan will consist of doing two things: immobilizing the enemy and moving in for the “kill”.

Summer season fighting will require you to set up some natural choke points on your property. What I would recommend is the making of some kind of lubricant that you can spread around your perimeter. Given that your enemy does not have the reasoning skills to do anything other than what its impulses will lead it to do, if you have some kind of trap that will not only allow it to slip, fall, and keep it from getting up, you will be able to use what you have on hand at your leisure.

A net in a well-marked area will certainly work when it is either dropped on the enemy or laid as a snare trap. Once the zombie is immobilized a pitchfork to the eye or even a broomstick with a knife tied to in (in a bayonet fashion) will save you time and energy. The zombie will struggle until you “take it out”.

A winter strategy might work best with the use of a garden hose and water. When you create that layer of nearly invisible thin ice, you’ll have the zombie injure and possibly break its own arms or legs in the fall. Should you be able to incapacitate them in this manner, you’ll be able to dispose of them with minimum effort.

In reality, we all know that the possibility of a zombie apocalypse is not likely to ever happen.

What’s more probable is that you’ll be watching a zombie movie and you’ll be thinking to yourself when the hero or heroine gets trapped in a house surrounded by zombies what you’d do differently. There is also the scenario that you’ll be participating in some kind of zombie run and you’ll need to think fast on how to avoid the zombies while not doing anything to incapacitate them – because we need to remember that they are just volunteer actors who are just doing this for the fun of it.

You have to remember that actors are people, too – despite how they eat.

It is a sad testament to my own mind that I actually do have a real battle plan for my own property in the event of a real zombie apocalypse. It involves an eight foot platform, some bait, and a long dangerous sledge hammer. With enough supplies, I could probably hold them off until the seasons change for the worse.

But that’s just me. More responsible people concentrate on the skills they need to be prosperous in their own professions – to do the monotonous thing they do day in and day out without thinking.

All in all, this is just a distraction. It’s what we all do to keep from letting the horrible realities of life from getting us down. We as ordinary people like to escape our mundane lives and manufacture ways to survive against the assault of an impossible, nearly indestructible opponent. And in doing so, we create the very thing that puts zest into our own lives and brings the part of our brain that makes us giggle to life.

And that’s the actual benefit to living.