T w e n t y S i d e d

And so this series drags ever onward. Before I get back to the making of silly plans for an even sillier eventuality, I should address a few remarks I see coming up again and again:

Q: Hey Shamus, wouldn’t it make more sense to make your defenses using razor wire / bulldozer / .50 machine gun nest?

Obviously any of that would be better than wooden pikes. I’m sort of torn. On one side I’ve got people challenging me for giving myself too many unlikely resources, and on the other people are wondering why I’d ignore such things. Earth-moving equipment, razor wire, and military hardware are all cool stuff. But they’re also kind of exotic. Yes, they’re easier to acquire after the zompocalypse than before, but a lot of other people are likely to come to the same conclusion. Rather than haggle over just how hard it would be to acquire, relocate, operate, and maintain a bulldozer, I just decided to leave the fancy stuff out. You can assume that if our team happens across two miles of unattended barbed wire and a bulldozer with the key in the ignition, we’d put that stuff to use.

Q: You should go to the library!

That’s not a question.

Q: Sigh. Fine. WHY DON’T YOU GO TO THE LIBRARY?!?

That’s an awesome idea. My only concern with that idea is that a lot of people have that idea. Same goes for Home Depot. Those places might even get cleaned out in the first days, before everything falls completely apart. Rather than assume I’d be one of the lucky ones, or that I would get there first, let’s just assume I’d stop by, see the place is empty or overrun, and move on.

Q: How many people are in your group?

Yeah. This is my mistake. I should have nailed this down at the start. If not for the reader, then at least for my own benefit. Sometimes I’m picturing a group of six or so, like Lee’s group. Sometimes I’m picturing a group of a dozen adults, plus children. We have no way to guess at how many people survive. (This value is always set to “whatever the writer says it is for the purposes of the story.”) So we should have simply chosen a useful number at the outset and stuck with it. Obviously the population of the group will have a huge impact on what sort of projects we can undertake. Two dozen adults could put up a pike fence in a few days. If we’re six adults plus children, then such a project is probably way out of reach and we should focus on fortifying our homes and staying quiet.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My Zombie Plan, Part 4”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

According to the previous entries, we’re a few weeks into the zompocalypse. It’s late-ish summer, perhaps mid-August. Once things settled down we formed a little band of survivors, I miraculously survived, and even more miraculously I was chosen leader. We scouted around for a few days looking at farms before choosing the best location we could find.

Assuming we survived all that and the writers didn’t decide to bump me off early, then we’re now living in a cluster of houses along a river near a farm. We’re operating under a “no one left behind” mentality. Now we need to get down to the business of surviving.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My Zombie Plan, Part 3”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Recap from last time: We’re living in a small cluster of houses, beside a farm, by a river. The sparse population means we won’t be getting mobbed by millions of city zeds. We’re just close enough to civilization to be able to drive to the city, forage, and return home before dark the same day. (Assuming it turns out such a thing is worthwhile.) This location also means we don’t need to build as much wall, since we’ll be protected on one side by water. In this rural setting, we’re probably using a septic tank and don’t need to dump our sewage in the river.

We begin in late-ish summer (mid August) and begin working the farm, figuring out how things work, and preparing to harvest whatever they were growing here.

So now we have a place to live and work to do. Let’s get down to the details of running this place…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My Zombie Plan, Part 2”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.