Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (16 page)

Symptoms of dehydration can manifest in just a matter of hours, starting with a persistent and intensifying thirst and building to fatigue, chills, and headache. Nausea soon sets in, as your muscles cramp and you experience tingling of the limbs. If you can’t find adequate drinking water, your situation will quickly deteriorate, leading to vomiting, racing pulse, vision problems, confusion, seizures, and even unconsciousness, and finally death.

On July 30, 1945, the USS
Indianapolis
was torpedoed and sunk in the Philippine Sea. Of the 900 men who abandoned ship, only 316 were still alive when rescue planes spotted them four days later. Though the constant threat of shark
attack is what brought the ordeal global attention, as recounted by the fictional salty sea captain in the film
Jaws
, dehydration killed far more people than the sharks:

First your mouth turns to cotton. Your saliva turns thick and bitter, until it disappears altogether. You become aware of your tongue as a fat, dry thing barricading your air passage. Your throat dries out until you can’t talk, and you feel a massive lump in your windpipe, forcing you to swallow again and again, and every swallow is painful, but the lump won’t go away. Without tears in your tear ducts your eyelids begin to crack, and you might weep blood.
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The survivors of the
Indianapolis
remember the mass delusions suffered by their fellow sailors. Men thought the water was fresh just below the surface. Some thought they could see land and swam off to their deaths. Others were sure that the water fountains on the sunken ship would still work. Dozens of men dived down all at once, never to be seen again. Ocean survival is clearly a unique situation, but even if you can find fresh water to drink, water-borne illnesses might pose as deadly a threat as having no water at all.

January 12, 2011, was the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed an estimated 300,000 people and crippled the country’s already weak infrastructure. Even the presidential palace was reduced to rubble. But one year later, nearly every news outlet in the United States reported that the biggest threat to the lives of those who survived was a lack of clean drinking water.

David Walton is deputy chief of the Haiti mission for Partners in Health, a nonprofit relief organization. Speaking about the proliferation of cholera, he says that hundreds of
thousands of people contracted the disease within months of the initial disaster, and once the problem starts, it’s almost impossible to control:

If cholera was introduced into the United States tomorrow, it wouldn’t take root because we have great sanitation, we have potable water. If you look at a place like Haiti that is one of the most water-insecure nations in the world and one of the nations that has some of the worst metrics in terms of sanitation, this is the perfect setup for cholera to both spread like wildfire and set up shop for years to come.
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Walton’s assessment is based on a functioning sanitation and municipal water system continuing in North America. But if systems fail in an undead outbreak, as will likely be the case, we in the industrialized world will find ourselves at serious risk of dying of dehydration caused by diarrhea and vomiting associated with any number of water-borne diseases such as cholera and dysentery.

If you haven’t stocked up on water in advance of the zombie plague, then you’ll be on a forced march to find a ready source almost immediately. Common strategies include filling up bathtubs while the taps are still flowing, collecting rainwater, and looking for available pools.

The average home water heater holds 50 to 75 gallons, or 6,400 to 9,600 ounces. In simple terms, an adult male should drink roughly 64 ounces of water per day. So once the heater
water has been properly purified, it should provide enough drinking water for two people to be fully hydrated for at least fifty days.

Start by shutting off the water and gas to the building. This may be contrary to instinct, but the danger of contaminated fluids compromising your existing reserves outweighs any potential benefit. Next, locate the building’s water heater. It’s a large metal tank, usually in the basement, utility closet, or laundry room.

Even if you have a tankless water heater in your own home, chances are you will find yourself on the run and hiding out in new and unfamiliar shelters before too long. Water boilers can serve as lifesaving wells in the dry urban-desert landscape.

Shane Painter, author of
The Urban Survivalist Handbook
, recommends finding a plot of open grass in the early morning when other options fail:

Now take a sheet and begin dragging it over the grass to collect the dew. As the sheet becomes damp you can wring it out into a bucket. Depending on how big an area you are dragging you could get up to a gallon of water per day.
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In testing, this technique produced wildly varying results depending on climate and location.

Adequate drinking water is essential to buy you needed time to fashion weapons, communicate with other survivors, and develop a solid plan for escape or further fortification. It also prevents you from dying in just a matter of days.

According to the World Health Organization, 3.5 million people die each year from water-borne illness across the globe. In a zombie outbreak, even the fresh-looking water coming from a working kitchen faucet may hold sewage backup and other deadly toxic substances. It does no good to locate a ready source of water, such as a plugged gutter, rain bucket, or toilet bowl, only to have unseen microbes incapacitate anyone brave enough to drink. Boiling water is a solid option but not always possible. So what’s the answer? Drink bleach.

Mixed in the correct ratio, unscented bleach added to water can kill any unwanted contaminants and render the source safe for human consumption. In rough terms, half a tablespoon of bleach mixed into five gallons of clear water (or 2.5 gallons of cloudy water) should do the trick. Stir in and let sit for thirty minutes. If the water does not have a chlorine smell when finished, add more bleach.

So, next time your buddy says that all he needs is his doublebarrel shotgun and enough ammo to blow every zombie’s head off from here to Cleveland, tell him that you’re going to invest in a bottle of bleach instead, and you’ll pray for him after he’s killed by diarrhea-related dehydration from drinking the tainted water in his badass camouflage commando canteen.

If you’re inclined to prepare your water-purification kit ahead of time, there are dozens of different filters and purifiers that can be easily found and purchased through a simple Internet search. But for solutions on the fly, coffee filters are good for cleaning turbid or muddy water, or even spare clothing such as socks. Most important is that you assume that all water is in need of purification before drinking and take any steps at your disposal to purify it.

As a helicopter pilot and one of the last remaining humans on earth, Flyboy is an unskilled survivalist who can’t even shoot straight when his life depends on it. Played by David Emge, Flyboy goes from leading man to cult favorite zombie, lurching around in one of the most distinct zombie walks any actor has ever created.

Depicted here with a baby, Flyboy never gets to see his unborn child in the original film, but there is a zombie newborn in the
Dawn of the Dead
remake of 2004.

ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS BROERSMA

I
n a zombie world, as in any extreme survival situation, the idea of shelter has to be thought of broadly. Shelter is any external protection from that which might do you harm. Forget about sleeping snug in your own bed or crashing on your neighbor’s couch. Forget about pulling over to a roadside hotel after a long, hard day of travel. When the dead walk the earth, Motel 6 may quickly become a luxury beyond your wildest dreams.

Instead, think of shelter as an abandoned parking lot in the middle of a burned-out city. It’s a fallen tree in the woods to shield you from harsh winds and rain. It’s a pile of discarded roof shingles in the back corner of an old trash depot or the crawl space behind a sewer drain grate. Shelter is even the clothes on your own back or a found beach towel cut into strips and wrapped around your aching, swollen feet.

I love zombie movies. I love the classics. I love the new stuff. I even love the crap that nobody else loves. And I understand that zombie movies are meant to entertain, not to provide sound survival advice, so it’s unfair to judge them against real zombie-outbreak scenarios. Nonetheless, I’m always struck by the flawed actions that survivors in zombie movies continue to take long after learning the relevant facts about the threat they face, especially when it comes to clothing. Their critical errors in judgment and preparation inevitably cost more lives than the zombie menace would on its own.

This issue can be summed up in one simple question: If you were facing a deadly viral threat that could infect you with just a single drop of blood in your eye, don’t you think you’d at least wear sunglasses?

In Danny Boyle’s
28 Days Later
, a gang of survivors has plenty of time to spin whimsically around an empty, fully stocked grocery store, debating the merits of different types of liquor and chocolate, but somehow the concept of ducking into the sports shop across the street and grabbing a pair of ski goggles and maybe some racing leathers completely escapes them. What’s more, the tough-as-nails lead female repeatedly hacks infected attackers to death wearing little more than a T-shirt, with nothing covering her face or mouth to protect against deadly blood spatter. This happens across all movies, from
Dawn of the Dead
(1978) to
Zombieland
(2009). The examples are endless. When the dead rise, if we as a society make as many silly mistakes about how to suit up as our cinematic counterparts, we’ll all be toast.

Specific clothing needs are a function of location and climate, but there are basic rules of survival clothing that apply anywhere and in any disaster situation, and it all starts with your brain.

Human beings have big brains. That’s our defining attribute. We are more intelligent than everybody else in the animal kingdom. Our bodies are designed to service that brain, providing the nutrients, oxygen, and protection it needs to function. Our bodies are not designed to keep us alive in extreme situations. We don’t have a thick, furry hide to defend against the winter freeze like an Arctic fox’s. We don’t have the natural armor plating of a cockroach. We can’t eject and regenerate body parts as the common lizard or a young spider does. Our smarts are supposed to keep us from freezing to death, being crushed, or losing limbs. So be smart.