Zombie Preparedness?

I’m afraid we are woefully underprepared for any impeding zombie attack. Knowing my interest in undead matters, my S.O. recently forwarded me a link to a blog where someone had done a situation asessment in order to guage their own level of zombie attack preparedness. This, of course, led me to do my own asessment — and I’m afraid I come out woefully unready.

I no longer own any firearms, which is probably a bad thing… but I’m familiar enough with them to know that even a great shot (which I am not) will be unable to hit a zombie in the head with a pistol while running down the street. If I had money to burn (which I don’t), I’d buy an assault rifle/semi-automatic first, and a shotgun second(even a 16 or 20 ga. with a low power field load will make a pumpkin explode like Gallagher, so I’d imagine it would work great on zombies that are 30 feet away). A pistol would be third on my list.

I am, however, well equipped with tools and hand weapons, including a crowbar, baseball bat, various hammers, etc. I think my short handled garden shovel might be a pretty good zombie-fighting tool… you could whack with the flat and I could use a file to give it a blade for decapitation… plus one could always also use it to dig a hole. I also own a chainsaw and even know how to start it.

We live in a single story house with an attached garage and half basement on a dead end street. Unfortunately, there are a lot of windows at ‘zombie crash-through’ height, so unless I had several hours, our house would fill up with the walking dead pretty quickly. The zombie lore I am familiar with is pretty scarce on the utility of dogs in a zombie attack, but we have 2 dogs, one of which is particularly alert and watchful. Most zombie movies have someone getting bitten by a zombie who has, at some point, wandered up behind them, so I’m putting dog ownership in the ‘good’ column. I don’t know if the barking of dogs would attract zombies… a dog was featured in Zack Snyders ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and the zombies in that film showed no interest in it because the zombies only at people… but the Zombie Survival Guide tells a different story.

If I had time, I could probably fortify the house fairly well. I’d probably nail furniture and wood over most of the windows and make the garage our place of ‘last retreat’ where we could use the chainsaw to cut through the roof and retreat to the rooftop and draw the ladder up after us. If I had time, I’d set up a tent on the roof to keep us out of the wind and rain. Although the garage is not the most comfortable place, I would want access to the cars so we could drive through the zombies if we had to (although a Toyota Prius is probably not the best vehicle for plowing through a crowd, it does have a long range on a full tank of gas).

We also are pretty well supplied with food and water. I’d fill the bath tub and the basement utility sink with water for drinking and we could use a bucket in the garage as a toilet. Once the water runs out, we could drink the water from the basement sump (assuming I filter it with my camping water purifier).

We also have a lake in the back yard. If worse came to worse, we could jump into the canoe and paddle out to the middle of the lake. Not the most comfortable place to be, but seeing as the lake is apparently about 80 feet dep at the center, unless the undead can swim we would be safe there.