Episode 409: If I’m Not Back…

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Dave

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Zombie Cliche Lookout: Abandonment

When the chips are down, sometimes heroes have to step up and take some big risks, which sometimes (often) leads to big sacrifices. This is true in zombie tales, of course, but also in pretty much every other kind of story. It probably even happened in Twilight. Heroes are heroes because they’re willing to put the good of the group before their own, even if that means they face the possibility of having their faces eaten off by the walking dead.

Of course, my absolute favorite example of this trope is something of a counter example, and comes from the Joss Whedon vehicle Firefly/Serenity (which has space zombies, called Reavers). In it, our heroic captain runs out to save the day, turning his ship over to his right-hand woman. He instructs her that, should he not return promptly, she’s to take the ship and come rescue him, for god’s sake.

Big damn heroes, all.

About this Episode:

After some great feedback last week, I’m playing around a lot more with my aperture; trying to introduce a bit more variety into the depth of field in these shots. It’s all a work in progress, of course, but I’m having a good time experimenting and learning more about photography.

Discussion Question: Improvise a Shelter

This week was Halloween, and as I do every Halloween, I watched Night of the Living Dead (this year I watched the original and the Tom Savini remake from 1990, natch). One of my favorite parts of the movie is when they’re boarding up the house, using whatever is lying around to secure the place. For whatever reason, there is lots of lumber (the remake explains this a bit). In reality, it’s unlikely that we’d have much in the way of board lying about our house.

So here’s the challenge: the zombies are coming, and you’re at home, your family safe around you. What do you do with the supplies on hand to secure your home? Take down interior doors? Disassemble furniture? Pile heavy stuff in front of doors and windows? Lay it out.

9 thoughts on “Episode 409: If I’m Not Back…”

  1. Just moved into a new house, so I’m still trying to figure out the best way to secure most of it against zombies.
    Thankfully, it’s a small-ish house and there aren’t a whole lot of windows, of course there aren’t a whole lot of interior doors either (4 to be exact) so that’s a very shallow resource pool. We’d probably use two of the doors to barricade the back double doors, which are mostly glass anyway, and the other two to cover the living room windows.
    Moving the washer and dryer in front of the narrow washroom window will work for a while, and we can use the couch and small entertainment center to block the front door.
    The bedrooms would be a bit trickier as each has two windows on different walls. They’re far enough away from each other that we can’t just use one barricade for both. I could probably take my corner desk apart and use parts of that to block my windows and we could use my roommates’ antique desks to block off their windows.
    That leaves the kitchen windows. Those are close enough together that we could probably just put the dining table between them and the sink then pack in some heavier boxes that haven’t been unpacked to hold it there.
    We could also use the kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors to reinforce the other barricades, though I wouldn’t trust them alone to hold out for long.

    • Hey, at least you have good interior doors. In this house they’re all hollow-core doors, which means they’re completely useless.

  2. Well, it all depends on how long we have to prepare. My father and I do some random work in the garage from time to time, so we do actually have a fair number of boards and plywood lying around. If we have time to go back and forth from the garage to the house (somewhat implied by the fact that we can apparently go at it with hammer and nails, cordless drill and screws, without being eaten on the spot), then we can actually make some of our fortifications look semi-professional. If we have time, my father has made some heavy duty workbenches that could certainly be taken apart and used. The sawhorses in the corner would be used, we could probably tear the plywood off the one interior wall without too much fuss…

    Hell, if we have ample time we could even take apart the decking and porches, which would provide plenty of lumber and make it harder to reach the doors and windows.

    Of course, we also have a lot of windows to board up, so the kitchen table, bed frames, shelving, etc, is going to get put to use. Both of our beds are home made, so we can salvage some 2x4s, 2x6s, plywood, etc, especially from my father’s which he made for a king sized mattress with reinforced storage drawers underneath. (We like to over engineer things. Once he made a kitchen table you could park a car on because my mother made homemade bread and any reasonably priced table on the market would have lasted a week with her kneading bread on it.)

    The shelving and our computer desks I don’t trust so much because they are store bought stuff that is basically particle board, so they would probably be jam packed with stuff, propped against the wall wholesale and then screwed down. Interior doors could be used, but you’d have to reinforce with anything laying around, ripping trim off the walls, etc, because they are cheap plastic things. After that, we’d just be piling stuff against openings, couches, chairs, books (We have a metric ton of books), mattresses, etc, etc.

    Long story short: Give us time to grab everything out of the garage, take apart the workbenches in same, tear up the decking, apply all the tricks and tools of the trade, and we’d make the windows and doors the strongest part of the house, but if we’re rushed then all bets are off.

    • If it isn’t clear here, I think the decking and porches would provide ample supplies to properly board everything, and if we are able to do that, the interior stuff I talked about would then just be propped against the fortifications to provide more peace of mind than anything else. I think we would probably pile everything and anything against the outer walls just in case the zombies were to actually try going through the walls.

      • Really cool idea with pulling up the porch decking, Bob. We’ve got a front and rear porch, which would give us quite a bit of wood (including a lot of 4x4s) if we had the time to gather it.

  3. Improvised shelter?

    Alright here we go; get a 36 x 36 x36 size box

    ~ Have Duct Tape

    ~ Reinforce Box

    ~ Sleep in Box

    ~ Success

    • Hah. An impenetrable fortress!

  4. I’m moving AGAIN in a month, but in my current house, I think I could secure it. It’s an apartament. The main door can be opened from the outside, if it isn’t locked. The most sturdy pieces of furniture just pile them against that door. I would cover the windows with curtains and disamble some furniture to barricade them. Even though I live in the 3º floor, and zombie can’t climb, If they saw me, it would cause attention. Plus, it serves as protection if bandits try to raid my house.

  5. If Zombies can’t break through a regularly locked door then I am okay but if they are strong enough extra blocking the door won work since they could just pull off the siding and bust through the dry wall. I never understood why people don’t do this for home invasions. Seems easier than breaking through a door. Problem is how long you can lock yourself in for, can you survive that time in there? Panic room or tornado shelter are great but when is it safe to open the door. How to resolve using up supplies and storing sewage etc. I’d rather have a lot of gasoline and a mobile shelter – something with thick walls that can get over rough terrain if need be. Oh and a gun turret lol