Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (25 page)

In terms of zombie survival, we are becoming less self-reliant, less physically and mentally fit, and less able to avoid or escape disaster when it strikes.

Where do you run when the mass of zombies is too thick to penetrate? Where do you hide when your desperate neighbors are so close at hand they can hear you breathing? How do you fight when the undead are less of a threat than the tens of millions of terrified survivors scrambling for life outside your front door?

For too many of us, the answers won’t be pretty.

Experts have long known that population density is a major factor in evaluating a person’s risk for falling victim to crime, disease, and man-made disasters, but it is also the leading indicator of zombie survivability. Overpopulated cities don’t just cause problems for urban planners, power suppliers, and pollution regulators; they create a citizenship that is shockingly unable to take care of itself in a crisis.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, before 2000, there were only three urban areas in the world with a population of more than 10 million: Mexico City, New York, and Tokyo. As of 2010, at least thirteen additional cities have reached that size, and in the next ten years, the number of megacities worldwide is expected to double. Add to that another 381 metro areas with a population greater than 1 million, and it’s easy to see that the global community is crowding dangerously together.

Despite the traditional cinematic depiction of zombies attacking a small group of survivors in a remote farmhouse, the real danger of a fast-spreading undead sickness lies in big
cities. As the trend toward urbanization continues, the world becomes less and less likely to survive the coming zombie pandemic.

In North America, Mexico’s big cities are the most tightly packed, but more surprising is Canada’s poor showing. Though greater New York City leads the pack in population with 21,295,000, both Toronto and Montreal house more people per square mile. In fact, the three large Canadian urban centers studied—Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—beat out an impressive list of fourteen major U.S. cities, including Chicago, Phoenix, Dallas, and Philadelphia.

Even with the best preparations, if your local community becomes a toxic zombie environment, there may be no way to make yourself truly safe. With this in mind, there is a simple way for ordinary citizens to evaluate their own city’s chances.

The Regional Outbreak Survivability ranking, or ROS rank, takes into account three primary factors when predicting the level of saturation a zombie outbreak will achieve in any given urban setting:

1.
Combat readiness.
What is the population density in your area? What percentage of the citizenship owns a firearm or has combat training? Are there available military resources stationed nearby?

2.
Infrastructure.
Do the area’s roads offer many different travel routes in and out? Is the local climate and topography a strategic advantage? Can abundant freshwater and other resources be easily accessed?

3.
Civil response.
Are police, fire, and rescue services highly trained in emergency preparedness? Is the local population psychologically ready for disaster? Are there ample hospitals and other public services?

Let’s use Los Angeles as a test case. The city scores relatively low in combat readiness because of its high population density and average gun-ownership rate. Despite a favorable climate, its infrastructure score is also poor, because transportation options and water resources are horrible. Finally, its civil response score is high because emergency training is excellent, and the threat of earthquakes has created strong cultural preparedness for disaster.

Overall, Los Angeles gets a C+. What is your city’s ROS rank?

By comparing hard statistical data from different regions throughout the United States, including population density, climate, topography, gun-ownership rate, military presence, and public infrastructure, the zombie survival picture becomes clear.

According to the calculations, the Northeast rates lowest in likely survivability against the undead. Eight of the top ten states in terms of population density are in that region, with New Jersey leading the pack at one thousand people per square mile. But the supporting data don’t stop there.

The Northeast also has extremely low gun-ownership rates, with six of the least-armed states being in that area of the country. A lot of people and not a lot of firearms, along with crowded urban centers and clogged transportation corridors, lay the groundwork for a deadly explosion in the zombie population.

Which region is the safest? The middle Northwest boasts low population density and high gun ownership, with Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota landing
in the top ten in both categories. In fact, Wyoming is rated second highest in overall survivability, with just five people per square mile and topping the list with an estimated gun-ownership rate of almost 65 percent. The region benefits from rugged terrain accented by large expanses of open land and an impressively self-reliant population.

Standing out above the rest, Alaska captured the top spot. Though it came in second in combat readiness, it boasts only one person per square mile. But as we’ve seen, Alaska’s natural benefits offer specific challenges, too, highlighting the fact that no place is perfect when it comes to zombie survival.

TOP TEN STATES

1. Alaska

2. Wyoming

3. Montana

4. South Dakota

5. Idaho

6. North Dakota

7. Arkansas

8. Utah

9. West Virginia

10. Mississippi

BOTTOM TEN STATES

41. California

42. Delaware

43. Florida

44. Illinois

45. Maryland

46. New York

47. Connecticut

48. Massachusetts

49. Rhode Island

50. New Jersey

To be clear, living in a state at the bottom of the survivability list doesn’t guarantee certain doom any more than living in one at the top guarantees success. I would much prefer to be fully emotionally and physically ready for a zombie outbreak in Massachusetts than caught completely off-guard and unprepared in Montana. Ultimately, true zombie survival is an individual concern, with each person making the choices necessary to either stay alive or die trying.

Ratings and statistics are important only to the extent that they give you a better understanding of the bigger picture, providing insight into potential areas of concern in your survival landscape.

A
ccording to the American Red Cross’s 2010 World Disasters Report, the next global disaster—whether natural, man-made, or zombie—may well be even worse than any we’ve experienced in the past several decades. The report finds that rapid urbanization, poor local governance, population growth, inadequate health services, and a rising tide of urban violence make the human race increasingly vulnerable to catastrophe.

Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, has done extensive research on likely governmental reactions to a global zombie plague. His resulting nonfiction work,
Theories of International Politics and Zombies
, was published by Princeton University Press in February 2011.

Drezner argues that preventing an undead outbreak isn’t possible, because we don’t know how zombies will ultimately be created and where they will first crop up. The only option is contingency planning for a worst-case scenario, but as we’ve seen with any number of other large-scale disasters in recent years, that planning is rarely done:

It’s a global reality. Governments are composed of bureaucracies, and what all bureaucracies try to do is create standard operating procedures to handle routine things. Zombies aren’t routine, and applying these procedures to them likely won’t work very well.

Overwhelming evidence suggests that bureaucracies will falter in the face of a zombie pandemic, but what of the world’s military establishment? Couldn’t the stronger nations overpower their undead foe with strict discipline and overwhelming firepower? Or at the very least, wouldn’t the threat of human-on-human violence be quelled by the mere presence of government troops?

As we have seen, when disaster strikes hardest, abundant food and potable water jump to the top of the list of survival priorities. Without water to drink, you can’t make it more than a week. Without food, you’ve got a month, tops. This immediate need for the essentials of life has the potential to undermine any military effort to control the worsening situation. And because zombies don’t share the same survival limitations, they continue to multiply and grow stronger in numbers, while the global population grows weaker by the day.

In the weeks after the devastating Haitian earthquake of 2010, upward of fifteen thousand U.S. troops were sent to keep the peace, with their primary objective being to protect the precious relief supplies arriving from all over the world. With a total Haitian population of just 9 million, that’s roughly one soldier for every six hundred people. Still, reports of violence and looting were rampant.

To reach that same level of military presence within the United States, the government would need to deploy 517,000
troops to the streets of every city and town from Florida to Oregon. That’s roughly 90 percent of the active-duty soldiers in the entire army assigned to protect pallets of bottled water. And if a zombie outbreak causes desertion rates to spike, the other branches of service could be swallowed up, too. Would you show up for duty in Georgia knowing your spouse and children might be attacked and killed in your home in Iowa?

No doubt, some nations will fare better than others, simply because of their military capability, infrastructure, and stocked resources. So, which is the best, and which is a zombie nightmare waiting to happen?

When comparing the outcomes of a zombie outbreak with other more common natural and man-made disasters, we find that the worst places to be are generally poorer countries with dense populations. Authoritarian regimes often fail miserably under the weight of these large-scale stresses, too. Which countries rank lowest globally in the case of a catastrophic undead pandemic? All available data clearly point to two that are likely doomed.

With 1.35 billion people living on 3.7 million square miles of land, China has a population density lower than that of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. However, its paltry gun-ownership rate of just 3.5 percent means that the People’s Republic has a fraction of the number of armed citizens residing in the United States. Add into the mix a notoriously secretive government that rules with an iron fist, and China ranks near the bottom in global zombie survivability. But another country is even worse off.