Costco.
Small number of secure entrances. A lifetime supply of batteries and solar kits. Tons of shelf stable food and drink. Clothing. Tacky home decor to make the apocalypse feel more homey.
It would be great.
It would be great if there wasn’t thousands of other people in your city who had the exact same idea.
Fully stocked pharmacy, comfy mattresses, tvs and video games, car batteries and inverters to run the entertainment, and sometimes even citrus trees to prevent scurvy.
Downside is that without power to the building you have a lot of work to do to dump all the fresh food before it stinks up the place. That dairy cooler alone would get disgusting real quick.
luckily they have it all on pallets ready to go for you
Billionaire’s bunker island. Be the security guy with a gun that realizes that money doesn’t matter when civilization falls.
You know what’s cool about bunkers? They have fresh air intakes.
You know what’s cool about me? I know how to use expanding foam insulation.
Good point. But there should be a protocol to prevent innocent victims. Perhaps some way to clearly advertise that the bunker is free of infection by any original Epstein class owners…
Water, concrete, metal; halothane, sevo or carfent and naloxone if you want them alive.
You can find air intakes with smoke or microphone array cameras. Construction equipment is fleet keyed if you want to live out your Apocalypse dream and bulldoze or excavate.
Checkmate Zuckerberg
Assuming zombies are incapable of any higher reasoning, somewhere only accessible by climbing up a ladder or rope.
It works in PZ, it might work IRL.
Lemme grab my sledgehammer.
Climbing or swimming. Steal a luxery yacht and some solar panels, soil, and seeds, and you have a floating homestead.
Read The Zombie Survival Guide for why water isn’t much of a hinderance to zombies.
Zombie Survival Guide
I assume floating, like a corpse? That’s far from swimming though. Also, to get into a ship you generally need to climb a ladder too. It being on the water means it can move though, so you can change locations when needed.
Just any yard with a distinct lack of my milkshakes really.
hold up
And a bone apple tea to you!
Unless their hold is in their castle!
A yacht. It’s got solar power, water desalination, can get to uninhabited islands
I don’t know where the best options are for sure, but one perk of a (sail) yacht is that, unless port facilities are specifically a problem, even if some place other than a yacht is the best place to be, the yacht is probably one of the better places to get at least near the place in question.
One downside: I don’t know how much maintenance a sail yacht requires. Like, I don’t know long long one could last without access to spare parts. The ocean puts physical stress on boats, and saltwater is corrosive. Boats aren’t usually designed for long-term operations away from land.
Another perk is that if the fuel production and distribution system breaks down, if what you have is a sail yacht, you probably have one of the present-day sailing vessels available, and I’d imagine that some level of sail-based trade could show up again; it was historically an important way to move goods around. You’re probably comparatively-well suited to an “apocalypse economy” where transportation and distribution is degraded.
Joshua Slocum put in to port for several extensive refits on his boat over the course of his circumnavigation. (He famously did it solo for the first time around 1895.) Materials engineering had improved enough by 1968 to run the first solo, nonstop circumnavigation race, the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race.
Nowadays, the sea is still harsh. If one stayed in the less stormy locations, in more-northerly latitudes to avoid the full-bore tropical sun, one could reasonably expect to stay at sea without putting in to port for over a year. The biggest challange would be mental, as loneliness takes a huge toll, as does the bland diet required.
Maybe if it has sails. Otherwise you’re exposed each time you need to refuel at a port. But ferrying about between uninhabited islands for resources and sleeping on the boat sounds like a decent plan.
Well… If I knew how to sail, that is. Or tie proper knots.
It’s also assuming that the zombies can’t swim or walk on the seabed, which they usually can’t
At some point you have to assume that even if they can walk on the seabed that the physical pressure would just disintegrate their bodies. If the powers of necromantic reanimation can be overcome with a sword or a shotgun then surely several atmospheres of pressure applied across the entire body would do it.
There are already electric boats. With solar panels.
a 1950s school building. they were built like castles. have wide open lawns and high towers. windows were at least a story above grade, and the glass had that mesh embedded inside.
any windows or doors that are at grade can easily be barricaded or already are with high grade steel cages.
bonus if there’s an internal courtyard that can be used as a field for growing crops, water retention area, and just an outdoor exercise area.
schools already have a cafeteria and kitchen, showers, fitness and entertainment, first-aid and medical, an entire library, science/biological labs. many schools have also been retrofitted with solar panels as well.
a school is really the best place to hold up for any kind of natural disaster.
Super weird when someone posts what is likely a random stock photo of a place you went to school.
are you a hairy wizard?
Where’s safe? Where’s familiar? Where can I smoke?
The Winchester!
Surely this is the only answer?!
It’s “hole up,” by the way.
Maybe they’re asking where you want to commit armed robbery first?
I’ll buy that.
…
Just kidding, fork it over.
I think its fine.
Maybe yours is the true idiom but im not what you would call a literary legalist.
You seem legit to me. Maybe a little too legit…
“Secure” as in “fortify it against zombies and potentially other threats”
Or as in “I can get to it and lay some sort of claim to it”
Because if it’s the former, we probably need to put some restrictions on the scenario. That’s really the hard part of this and we’re just assuming we can do it, and your best bet is probably to secure as big of an area as possible. A city, a country, a whole hemisphere, or hell, the entire world or the solar system if we’re being really silly.
If we’re going with the latter, where we find a building or property of some kind and call “dibs” and the rest of it is up to us
I think a tech school is a pretty good bet, at least thinking of my local tech schools.
They have some fully stocked workshops with pretty much any tools and materials you could need- carpentry, plumbing, automotive, electrical, etc.
Maybe some kind of medical program, so probably a decent amount of meds and first aid equipment, in addition to whatever is in the nurse’s office.
A culinary program, so you have a well equipped kitchen and probably a decent amount of food on-hand.
Maybe it even has some sort of agricultural program with some farming equipment, maybe even some ready-to-go planted crops and possibly livestock.
Most schools are fairly secure with limited entrances and locking doors often they have backup generators and maybe even solar these days (odds are any school with a decent electrical program at least has a few solar panels kicking around somewhere) and you have the tools and maybe the materials there to further fortify it as needed.
And it probably has some pretty beefy fire suppression systems since you have teenagers playing with welders and industrial stoves/ovens.
Some college campuses might be as good or better for the same reasons, with the added benefits of there probably being some purpose-made living quarters, but they’re usually less compact, which has its plusses and minuses, more land to grow crops and such but harder to secure.
And if the apocalypse hits while school is in session, you have a bunch of young, hopefully reasonably-healthy people already on-hand to do some of the hard work if like me you’re not quite as spry as you used to be.
Walmart or similar has food, tools, guns, ammo, chemicals, and the building can be secured via steel shutters.
Yeah but the materials you have to work with are a little limited. At least around me, Walmart doesn’t carry much in the way of stuff like lumber, pipe, or other building materials, and there’s gonna be some gaps in the tools available, I don’t think most Walmarts carry welders around me, and even if they do you certainly wouldn’t be able to get the gases you need for MIG/TIG welding there, and you might want that if you, for example, need to repair those steel shutters.
And most Walmarts around me actually don’t carry guns.
And you can’t grow too much food on a parking lot, you can try to work with containers and potting soil of course, but odds are a school is gonna have more land you can easily convert to a food plot or maybe even the plumbing parts to get some kind of hydroponics system going.
Ok so we need a Walmart that’s between a college campus and hardware store with a lumberyard.
Lots of food is gonna rot.
First week gonna be a lot of smoking meats, and canning/preserving lots of fruits and vegetables.
Dairy coolers and frozen gotta be emptied as soon as power goes unless you can rig enough solar/gas generated power for them.
An island? Seems like a great way to isolate yourself from the masses
World War Z, the book, proved this wrong.
I don’t know, the old zombie flick ‘Shock Waves’ (1977)… Not typical zombies but it made the island approach seem a little less viable to me. It’s still better than my default choice of a mall.
It entirely depends on what kind of zombies.
As long as they aren’t evil magic zombies, I think the zombie threat is overrated.
As magic keeps those muscles moving, dehydration, infections, rigor mortis, and decaying flesh don’t really matter. After all, the whole point of magic is to violate the laws of physics and chemistry. With the other types though, decaying flesh does matter, which means that the problem will solve itself within a few days. Just keep the doors locked and windows closed in the meanwhile.
If you happen to be outdoors camping when the outbreak occurs, you don’t really have any doors and windows to keep you protected. If you have enough food to keep on camping for a few more days, you might be fine. After all, zombies are in the city, where there are lots of people. You’re out in the woods, so you might miss the whole zombie apocalypse when you come back home a week later.
The larger threat is based on if they are virus zombies, and not living-dead zombies. To your point, living-dead zombies will just deteriorate are die off. But virus zomies have a chance of still being able to survive for long periods of time. There’s also increased threat depending on how the virus is transmitted, it’s lifespan outside the body, mutations, so forth.
The way viral zombies are depicted in movies and games, they seem to lack basic survival instincts. That’s going to make them vulnerable to dehydration, which will stop their conquest within a few days. Infected wounds are the next problem they’ll face if they somehow manage to drink enough water.
Yeah, viral zombies won’t last long in the southwest. I ought to be good with just shutters on the house.
if the zombies are raised by a necromancers, we will have more problems. if its just the run of the mill pandemic virus.
If you’re facing a necromancer, you bring a party of clerics and paladins to deal with the problem.
Ok, fast zombies
There are a lot more considerations.
Look, I need to spend my efforts on the toxicity and climate collapse apocalypse. I would WELCOME zombies at this point.
There was a movie/TV show where the character was hunkered down in a wind turbine. Always thought it was a clever idea.
If I can automatically secure the location, then I pick the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Ok. But why?
A highly secure remote location that I’m sure has some kind of bunker, no shortage of guns. A good place to start looking for what caused the zombies and how to cure them.
Having access to all the other secrets they keep is icing on the cake. I don’t know how much I can get into without passwords but if I can tap into satellites or send messages to spies, that’s also useful.
