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By Mark D, July 8, 2011 1:14 pm

(A journal based on my adventures in Urbandead.com)

You know when they say a job is usually too good to be true? It usually is, especially when you call it and there’s an African on the other end asking about your skill with knives. But this one, this one sounded alright. I had the interview setup, wonderful building, everything looked on the up and up. I go into an office and boom, I’m out.

I wake up in the lovely Mist Library, no idea where I am or what I’m doing. On the bright side though I did get some reading in, before I heard some knocking on the door. Needless to say, once you see zombies at the front door of a library, you’ve pretty much figured out your on hell on Earth, Malton. These zeds sure wanted to come in, which really ruined my long term plans. I finally had enough time to read to my hearts content.

So I did what fight or flight always taught me what to do, run like hell. For some reason I always seem to naturally head east, and this was another one of those times. When I finally found myself far enough away, I had no idea where to go. Even better, with most places in lockdown, sleeping somewhere looked like it was going to be a chore. I finally found myself a ruined club with some shadey figures inside. I’m still shocked that I managed to sleep at all that night.

In the morning someone told me it would be a good idea to head to Treweeke, the only Mall in the area to stock up. After getting some directions I headed up that way. I had seen most of the remake of “Dawn Of The Dead” in Spanish when I was hungover one morning and couldn’t find the remote. This sounded like a good plan. Until I got up there and saw the absolute mess that was the Treweeke Mall. Picking through rubble and finding poetry books wasn’t exactly what I envisioned. I ended up spending a few days in a museum, only to find the mall repaired the next time I went outside.

Ahh, to be king of a mall! There’s nothing quite like riding up and down escalators in shopping carts. Or thinking about all the times I worked stocking shelves and had to be “taught” how to do it correctly. I don’t care where your supposed to go can of tuna, I like you best next to the beef jerky! It was a wonderful few days of meandering around and causing trouble.

Basically it was all fun and games until the Zombies showed up. But hey, no big deal, they only have one corner, there’s the other places I can hide. Then you wake up the next morning and they have three corners. But hey, this corner has held out so long, it’ll obviously keep holding out. See, when your young and bright eyed to Malton, you don’t realize that other Survivors RUN LIKE HELL the second anything goes wrong. So I shouldn’t have been nearly as surprised as I was when I woke up in the mall to a Zombie having my foot for lunch. Of course I still wasn’t smart enough to run like hell and decided the Police Department was a good place to hang out and sleep.

Death has no place in Malton. When you wakeup as a zombie for the first time there are no words for it. You lurch your way around and hope for the best. I can’t really describe it. The bright side is though, it can change your life (or afterdeath, or life after death after life?) in Malton. For me it brought me in touch with the Burchell Arms Regulars, and the good father who gave me a stab. It didn’t change immediately though.

I continued to wander around the relatively barren Rolt Heights suburb of Malton, taking the time to occasionally beat on a zombie with a fire axe. If you’ve ever cut down a tree, you sort of know what it’s like trying to kill a zombie with a fire axe.  With every swing it’s a chore getting the axe back out of them and bits and pieces just go flying everywhere. I’ve also never seen a tree open it’s eyes and attempt to eat the lumberjack while he was trying to get the axe back out of them. The only thing more horrifying is getting your foot nibbled on in your sleep. It’s amazing how many ways there are to die in Malton, and what will actually horrify you.

Libraries, Museums, Clubs, a whole life waiting there for anyone who wants to make it. Yet around every corner is the possibility of something REALLY lurking in the dark. Living alone in any of the beautiful suburbs of Malton for any amount of time is enough for you to realize this. When the length of pipe you found suddenly becomes your best friend and traveling partner, your sanity might be spreading thin. One night I ended up finding the Burchell Arms itself. A battered and beaten old English Style Pub, with just about everything in the local area used to barricade it. Full of life and raucous partying, I decided to take a closer look. Unfortunately I got a little too close and the last thing I heard was “Sante, Outside” before a load of shotgun pellets went buzzing by my head.

I decided to high tail it and nap in another Museum. This one probably takes the cake for all the museums I’ve been in, as it had a Shrine dedicated to a Stuffed Crocodile. I take back everything I said about my sanity being spread thin. For the next few weeks life seemed like a bit of a choir. Wake up, slap around some zombie with a fire axe, find somewhere at night that I could get into and sleep. When there’s very little ambient noise, everything feels like night. When I was outside Malton, walking around in the middle of the night I used to think a UFO was on the verge of picking me up. I guess it comes from living in a big city and always hearing noise at night. Now though, my eyes never wander the sky, I’m more worried about what’s going to grab me from below.

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By Mark D, May 16, 2011 1:56 am

So with all the recent zombie stuff everywhere, I was reading about World War Z. It’s basically about a world wide zombie breakout and humanity fighting back. Now it’s relatively believable until you get to the part in which the United States falls. And no, this isn’t going to be a rah-rah United States type of rebuttal. The argument laid out by Z is that after NYC falls, the army decides to make a chokehold in Yonkers and wipe out all the zombies in one large battle.

The problem? The infantry is told to dig Foxholes, while the artillery is given a limited supply of Anti-Personnel shells. Yes, with almost all of NYC zombies, they limit the amount of Anti-Personnel shells given to the Artillery and Tanks. The decision to dig out foxholes and use sandbags for barriers make the infantry easy targets. The excuse given is that the generals are leftovers from the cold war and don’t realize how to handle a human wave attack that has no fear of dieing. Of course that ignores a few points:

These are concrete barriers. You see them EVERYWHERE. They are nearly omnipresent. That makes it far easier to round up a bunch of them. If you stack them two high (and you can stack them easily) it’s about the same height as a person. You can also move them around and get together a large stock of them in a relatively short time. If you’ve ever seen the movie Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones, you know what I’m talking about.

This idea also fails because both the Soviets and the Chinese would make use out of Human Wave Tactics. The idea that these generals wouldn’t know how to react to human wave tactics is almost as silly as the idea of digging foxholes and making sandbag barriers. Instead you would most likely put up a barricade and then dig pits in front of those barricades. This isn’t a new tactic actually, it’s been used for thousands of years. Just think of a moat around a castle. Caesar and the Romans infamously did this a lot of time, even using camouflaged spikes in the pits in front of the barricades.

With construction tools and barricades, you could fairly easily make a large pit with a barricade on one side. Then it would just be a matter of setting up machine guns on heights and killing wave after wave after wave. Why you would ever limit the amount of anti-personnel shells when fighting ZOMBIES is just silly. The zombies aren’t going to suddenly start rolling up with tanks and airplanes.

Look, there’s a lot of ways for the United States to fall to a zombie apocalypse. Generals deciding to ignore tactics which are thousands of years old and would still work isn’t one of them. Hell, if you had enough archers you could probably use modern machinery to setup the defenses and still stop the zombies. Almost any armchair tactician could come up with a better plan then that which was used in the Battle Of Yonkers. That’s where the book losses me. It also doesn’t help that for some reason people didn’t try to make a stand at the Mississippi River and ran all the way back to the Rocky Mountains.

Look, it’s not exactly easy to cross the Mississippi, even more when you consider how far it’s major tributaries reach. In one of my favorite comics Evil Ernie, the Mississippi Wall holds out the hordes for years and reaches all the way up to Thunder Bay. The Mississippi would be one of the first major obstacles to someone invading from the east. That the zombies seem to spread past it without much trouble is odd. Did no one think to destroy the bridges over the rivers? You could still use barges to get people over the river. Or when the Horde is within site you could blow the bridges. Either way it’s a large plothole you could drive a truck through.