Zombie Cliche Lookout: Hiding in Vehicles
Zombies chasing you? Time to find shelter as quickly as possible. If you’re out on the street, the most expedient shelter available just might be an abandoned vehicle. And why not? They’re small and relatively easy to lock up from the inside. And, yes, the windows are glass, but automotive glass is pretty darn tough. It’ll hold up to a good deal of abuse. And, if you get really lucky, the keys might be inside, allowing you to take your new shelter with you. With all this in mind, is it any wonder how often characters in zombie movies end up trapped in cars?
Naturally, for every benefit an abandoned vehicle offers, it also has a trade off. For instance, the small space that’s easy to secure? It’s going to become suffocating very quickly. There’s also the fact that, unless you are uncharacteristically lucky, there’s no way that car is going anywhere. Even if the keys were left inside, the battery is likely long dead, and the gas in the tank turned to useless sludge (the shelf life of gas is much shorter than most people think).
About this Episode:
You have probably noticed the open stud on the side of the truck, directly behind the passenger cab by now. There is supposed to be a smoke stack there. It fell off at some point before I used the model in the strip, and I thought it looked kind of cool without it, so I didn’t repair it. My thought was that it made it look like the vehicle was heavily used and abused. Unfortunately, the more I use the model, the less I like that decision and wish I would have fixed it prior to shooting. Now I think it just looks a little out of place.
Discussion Question: Sell Me on Vehicles as Shelters
I’ve laid out some of the big drawbacks to using vehicles as shelters. Sell me on their pros.
Well, the pros of vehicles is that, if refitted correctly, they make great battering rams for clearing out large hordes of zombies or simply brushing them aside with great force. They also are highly mobile and some kinds of gas will likely last longer than other kinds.
For instance, the lifespan of petrol based fuels will be a lot shorter than diesel based fuels. The most important thing to remember about fuel in a zombie apocalypse is that it will biodegrade over time, so if you’ve been in a zombie apocalypse for a very long time most petrols will have started to degrade to the point where they would need to be topped off with fresh fuel or remanufactured to be made usable.
That fuel made from used cooking oil will probably also biodegrade pretty rapidly, one would need to be especially cautious of how long the fuel has been sitting in a tank, and whether the fuel has had contaminants like water sitting in the tank for a long period of time. This will mean that the fuel will be impure and more likely to cause knocking and will not burn completely in the combustion stroke thus leaving deposits of unburned fuel behind, common deposits are carbonized fuel remnants.
You can use the rear mirror to look behind you… That’s pretty much about it for me… Vehicles as shelters ain’t working for me. LOL
Well, there was a movie or TV show somewhere out there that used a large number of compacted vehicles and metal as a barrier to the zombies! 😀 That kind of shelter would be useful to you! 😉
Whilst I would be fine with taking temporary shelter against zombies by hiding inside a vehicle I can’t say I’d be happy doing the same thing in a Lego universe.
Lots of Lego cars have no opening doors or side windows.
Quite a few of them don’t even have a roof in fact!