Zombies

My mother is preparing for the zombie invasion.

This may seem like an odd statement, but it's true. She doesn't know she's doing it, she doesn't believe that the invasion is coming. Fortunately for her though, her instincts are much smarter than she is, and are forcing her to prepare unconsciously anyway.

I realised this when my sister mentioned that all her friends would come to our house when the zombies arrive. After thinking about this, I can kind of understand their logic. Although we don't have a cellar, and I always imagined hiding either somewhere underground, or somewhere many floors above ground (even seen a zombie try to climb stairs?)

The most obvious reason is the food supply. My mother has a giant chest freezer, and lots of kitchen cupboard space. She insists upon keeping both the freezer and the cupboards fully stocked, even though for most of the year only she and my sister (Steve) live in the house. She and Steve eat about the equivalent of one normal person's meal a day. Between them.

Mostly they snack on fruit, cheese and crackers, ice lollies and the odd pizza. Their diet is decidedly strange, but mostly it's just limited, and they generally eat very little. Usually if the supply is noticeably decreasing week-by-week, it's either because of me, or Steve's boyfriend, who loves cooking almost as much as he loves eating.

Due to this, you could easily not buy any food for about 3 months (I calculated this careful, and didn't just make it up, not at all). Admittedly, this only works if you don't mind eating lots of low-fat baked beans, and similar things. I suppose if there's a zombie invasion, you probably have bigger things to worry about.

The food isn't the only good reason though. We live in a village. We're about 20 minutes from the nearest real city, and ten from the nearest small town. The population is tiny, and is mostly made up of old people.

Now, you may have noticed that old people are pretty slow. Zombies are pretty slow too. Now, don't get ahead of me, I'm not going to suggest that old people are zombies already, that would be ageist! No, I just think that logically, old people will make even slower zombies than young people do.

So if the majority of the population of my village gets zombified, the plan of action will often be simply to walk away. They'll follow you, but you've got plenty of time to think of a better plan before they get there. Maybe you could offer them a boiled sweet instead of your brains. Or maybe you could hit them in the face with a shovel, it's up to you.

Of course, no one can be said to have survived the zombie holocaust, unless they have a long term strategy. Fortunately for us, there's a field behind our house, at the bottom of which is a river. Two minutes away is a wood, in which live rabbits, hare and deer. My point is that agriculture, fishing and hunting will all be more than possible.

Most people would ask if there's any kind of big wall around the area, which could be used to keep the zombies out. There isn't. Don't suggest building one, not even a fence from the trees from the wood. Let it look like an ordinary deserted village. Who're we keeping out? The zombified elderly? We've already decided that we can hit them with shovels, that seems just fine to me.

All we'd be doing by building defenses, is making other survivors believe we have something to defend. Sometimes people unite against a common enemy, sometimes they attack each other for their resources. Better to let them think we don't have any, they can join us peacefully if they must.

I might be having a bit too much fun with this, but I'm totally up for building an underground bunker in the garden and filling it with weapons and ammo. Y'know, just in case it turns out that this is the kind of zombie that can run fast, because if we get those, the old people will move at a pace fast enough to be worthy of target practice.

Oh! I should build a sniper tower too! Do you think a treehouse would work?