Surviving the Apocalypse

As usual, after watching some apocalypse television my mind has been entrenched for the last few days in planning how best to handle every style of total disaster emergency I could possibly ever encounter, and coming to the sad but inevitable realization that I am woefully underprepared for apocalypses of pretty much any sort.

A zombie apocalypse would do me in pretty quickly.  We don’t own any guns.  I have depicted below our entire zombie-fighting arsenal, which consists of all the things we’d have thought to use on a moment’s notice.  Not depicted are, for instance, frying pans or a shovel, which only occurred to me after the fact and would have thus gotten left behind in zombie-emergency-mode.  Actually I don’t think I own a shovel.

 click to enlarge

And let me tell you, I have almost no confidence in my ability to wield a baseball bat with enough force to liquefy zombie brains.  Even if we’re only talking about marauding fellow humans, I’m not really sure I could even knock someone out. 

(To give myself credit, I did play a lot of softball as a kid and I could hit pretty hard.  But I’ve never had any direct practice in concussion induction.  If anyone wants to volunteer as target practice I’d be much obliged!)

(You know, I think someone should make some sort of instructional head-bashing tutorial.  You could put it in a science museum or a zoo or something – like a fake head that you hit as hard as you can and Peter Coyote’s automated voice tells you, “Good job, you could kill a zombie with that swing!” or “Better keep practicing!”  Like when I was a kid, we went to the zoo by my grandparents’ house and it had this seriously awesome educational kids’ playground where you could test your speed against various animals.  You’d hit the button and this light would flash down a row of red bulbs at exactly the top speed of the animal you chose.  I learned that I have not the remotest chance of ever outrunning an alligator.  Which did not help to soothe my terror of alligators.  And which does not lead me to believe I could outrun a brain-hungry zombie – especially if it’s a rage-infected zombie.)

 This was apparently not a confidence building exercise.

Anyway, our house is also not the world’s hardest thing to get into.  We have bars on most of the windows – except the three massive living room ones.  But the bars for those windows are in the back yard so theoretically we could run around and grab them and… yeah, not put them up because we don’t have big enough bolts.  Okay, plan B – we definitely have enough wood and nails to board those windows up. 

The problem is really getting out of any of the barred-up windows should a break-in actually occur.  I’m already mortified in anticipation of the day some rapist breaks his way into my bedroom only to find me still flailing about comically trying to open my damn bathroom escape window.  This is another one of those things I should probably consider testing.

So my fortress is really a rat trap.  And we don’t even have a peephole in the door to be able to tell whether we’d be letting in friendlies or zombies.  This is a serious problem.

Outside of the zompocalypse scenario, most other cataclysmic events require being able to hunker down for a long while and self-sustain.  Totally screwed there.  Even now that we’re eating in we’ve got maybe a dozen meals in the house and enough water to last a week or two if we push it.  And that’s if we use the toilet water.  But at least we have purifying tablets.  And I think us desert rats can handle a little drought better than most.

So unless the apocalypse is something entirely innocuous like a one-day blackout, we’re like sitting ducks – we’d be the one of the multitude of extras in a Hollywood disaster movie.  I shall count aliens in with zombies as inescapable certain death.  There’s also no possible way we’d survive a nuclear holocaust or an asteroid impact.  We could maybe avoid a volcanic eruption, and I don’t think an earthquake would hurt too terribly.  We don’t have a good plan for floods or tornadoes or freak hurricanes, and like I mentioned my fire extinguisher’s really old and probably couldn’t hold off a forest fire for terribly long.  But we have no forest around for miles.  So… we win?