I found a brush axe at Lowes for about $35 and this tool is ready to go for the zombie apocalypse. Just be sure you know that with any cutting tool like a blade or a sword or an ax, you will also need the tools for sharpening the tool. Blades will dull quickly. You should do a YouTube search for the proper sharpening techniques for different blades. By the way, the sharpest blade in the hands of an idiot is useless, so be sure you practice your blade skills much like you would practice your gun skills.
Sword Tips:
Be careful purchasing swords. Most swords you find for sale online or at swap meets are not real survival, fighting swords. Most of these swords are for show or display. While these swords are better than nothing, try to find the kind of swords that can save your life in a nasty fight. A Lord of the Rings replica sword is not very useful in a zombie outbreak.
Make sure you research some information about caring for swords; cleaning, storing, sharpening. Check the web for certified swordsmiths. Ask them about “real” swords.
When it comes to swords, you tend to get what you pay for. I expect a $500 sword to be much better than a $50 sword. Buy them both and then go out and chop at some wood, trees, melons, and bamboo and see how they do.
Practice practice practice…on wood, melons, scarecrows. Practice moving, jumping, falling, rolling, running, climbing…with a dummy sword first. You could trip, fall, and cut off something important to you. Work on this until you get it together. Take a martial arts class that teaches sword fighting. Once the zombies are here, it will be too late. Hope, luck, and all the fast learning in the world won’t help you then.
Tell me again, why are you hating on M16s?
M16s and AR15s are political weapons. Some Congressman got his lobbyist friends to push this weapon to get mass produced for US military use. Look into it and you will find that there are several US guns that tested higher for military combat use than the M16. Some congressman was owed a favor and Colt got the contract. Plus keep in mind that the M16 is a military gun and the contract for these things often goes to the lowest bidder, with the lowest costs. The US M14 (also known as the M1A), which fires the more expensive 7.62 bullet, is actually known to be one of the best combat rifles ever made in the world, but those bullets and that gun are too expensive for mass production for the US military, so that makes them hard to find out there. The US military assault rifle of choice was selected based rigged favoritism and politics, so you can really get a sense of the issues with the M16. Take a look at the M16 and AR15s reviewed and in action on YouTube.
The AK47 is a worldwide tested weapon. Any gun nut will tell you that the AK47 is better for zombie killing than an M16. It has a bigger bullet and so it makes a bigger hole going in and coming out of a zombie. This bigger, higher powered slug also causes greater hydraulic damage on impact with a zombie, meaning you may not always need to shoot the zombie directly in the head with a 7.62 bullet to kill it. A high chest shot could cause enough cerebral damage to stop the zombie. When that large, high-powered bullet smashes through the zombie’s upper chest, the zombie will be thrown back and shockwaves of percussive energy will rattle its brain, bouncing that infected organ around inside its head, scrambling it well enough to do the job. Tests at Texas A&M proved this. This is why ZORT teams are always outfitted with M14s and other 7.62 combat rifles and machine guns, like my favorite of them all the M240 Golf, and not M16s. So the extra cost and extra weight of 7.62 rifles and bullets will prove to be worth the investment.
M16s are good anti-personnel (not anti-zombie) weapons because the smaller caliber 5.56mm (.223cal) bullet spins at a high rate and as it exits the rifle barrel, it is spinning enough to ricochet around inside the body it hits, puncturing several internal organs before it stops, making almost every shot deadly; "one shot - one kill". However, this small spinning bullet does hardly no significant damage to a zombie unless you shoot it in its head. Puncturing internal torso organs isn’t as useful on zombies. So with an M16, you will almost always need to hit the head of the zombie. The back and sides of the head are the best place to shoot, but you can also aim for the zombie’s eyes. A spinning .223 bullet ricocheting around the inside of a zombie's skull is pretty effective. You just have to know zombies probably won't stand still posing for your head shot. You will need to practice and consider the power of the 7.62s to do significant damage even if you do not hit the zombie in the head...or consider the shotgun for its ability to work well without precision. You need to make your choices and I already made mine. So if you get your hands on M16s and AK47s, keep your M16s handy for when dirt-bags show up and try to take your shit. Use the M16 against them for “one shot - one kill” and save your M14/M1A or your AK47 for the zombies.
One more time, is getting bit the only way to become a zombie?
No. There are a wide number of ways to have some sort of zombification vector contaminate you and make you into a zombie. Biting gets a lot of buzz because it just seems much more horrific to get bit and turn into a zombie. In the 1300s, Mongols would catapult zombie bodies over the city walls to infect city patrons and they also figured out they could simply drop zombies into the city’s water supply to contaminate city patrons. There are a number of Z-virus historical accounts where being bitten was not the primary way of being infected.
Recently, I was asked by an archeological team to come down and give their students a class on Native American zombies. The university wanted to show me their excavation site. When they were digging up an ancient city’s sewer route, they also found an ancient Native American burial place, but because of their archeological protocols, they needed to bring in a trained zombie expert. So, I got the call and I gave my class. Then I took a tour of the tunnels and the digging places underground.
Believe it or not, students started turning into zombies. So as shown here where no one was bitten, there are other ways to make zombies. Native Americans and the Egyptians used a type of zombie powder to turn grave robbers into zombies. If people become zombies from the powder, they can start an outbreak.
All we had at the excavation site were crude construction weapons. These included shovels, pick-axes, and I had a crowbar kind of thing. It was tough work in those tunnels bashing in the heads of all the infected students. I can’t tell you any more about this because of pending lawsuits.
What will the US military do during a pandemic zombie outbreak?
This is a great question. It’s important to have some clue about what the world’s best military will and won’t do during a zombie apocalypse. Much of what I have to say here is classified, so you didn’t hear it from me. I also describe military responses in additional FAQ after this one.
As can be seen in recent riots, states will activate their National Guards. If things get really bad, states will ask for Federal assistance, which usually starts with FEMA. In pandemic events, the protocols are the same.
States will activate their Guards, activate their own emergency response officials, and their own health departments. As any outbreak begins to spread, states will decide to quarantine certain cities to either prevent panicked contagious people from leaving and in a lot of places to keep panicked contagious people from getting in. States have to quarantine cities and towns that have infected and those that do not. Guard units will set up road blocks and begin low level intervention to quell riots, looting, and other forms of civil unrest. The Federal Aviation Authority will close airports and state and Federal Coast Guards will secure the sea lanes and ports.
Quarantining a state is a major military operation. Military Reservists and military Retirees will be called up and ordered back into active military service. If a pandemic outbreak starts outside the US, military and state guards will be used to secure US borders and ports of entry.
For pandemic events starting outside the US, the US military is authorized by a little known treaty with the United Nations (discussed later) and key NATO allies to intervene and use military force to quell such outbreaks. So if a city in South Kor
ea reports a pandemic outbreak of any kind, you can expect US military forces to quickly arrive and assist with sealing off borders and ports. Dropping nukes on these cities is also permitted if determined necessary according the treaty. I’ll also discuss this more in later FAQs.
Back at home, if the pandemic event spreads beyond cities in a state, neighboring states will activate their own guards and shut off their borders from the contaminated state. To secure any state lines, the Federal government will activate Army and Marine units to provide direct assistance to affected states. For this reason, you get a sense of why the military is so aggressive with its inoculation programs to include vaccinating all military personnel for the flu virus and the Z-virus among other things.
By this time the CDC and the state health departments should begin vaccinating people and quarantining contagious people. You need to round up all the contagious people so you can more quickly create working vaccines. Sick infected people will start to die in great numbers and then this is where zombie outbreaks begin.
If military containment fails…when it fails, the military will begin to pull back. Keep in mind, they are relatively immune and can wait out most outbreaks with their large stockpiles of life sustaining necessities.
When Washington DC falls, political leaders and some national influencers will be evacuated to a secret fortress facility somewhere in the Joshua Tree desert, somewhere near Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Pentagon operations will evacuate Washington DC to the NORAD military facility built into Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Interestingly enough, the senior Canadian military operations will also evacuate to the massive Cheyenne Mountain bunker. No, the President will not evacuate to the Space Station as has been rumored in several online chat forums. The President and all senior US government officials will be somewhere near Twenty-Nine Palms and senior military officials will be in Cheyenne Mountain. You can google this. It’s hardly secret because both locations are considered impenetrable by any outside force.
There are protocols where if the military cannot secure a city and containment breach is very likely, the President can authorize the use of nuclear devices to cut off the pandemic virus and protect other communities.
By this time US Navy forces have evacuated to their fleet of ships and have headed out to sea where they will establish three massive floating armadas, which will include aircraft carriers, Marine combat ships, and submarines. The fleet will split into three locations, in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida, off the coast of New York City, and between Los Angeles and Hawaii. The US Navy is prepared to operate at sea without coming in contact with land for up to 100 months. They tried to show this in the movie World War Z.
So you see what’s missing from almost every zombie apocalypse or pandemic outbreak movie out there. Somehow the military has vanished. The truth is not all of them will evacuate to secret locations or out to sea. Some of them will attempt to reestablish order from a variety of military bases such as Fort Hood in Texas, Camp Pendleton in Southern California, and at least 15 other military installations. Senior political leaders, senior military officials, and other key officials will attempt to wait things out and hang in there until the pandemic event subsides and then they will begin working to reestablish order, social services, and key industries.
Remember, if any pandemic event becomes uncontainable, the US government will want to let the thing run its course. Pandemic events eventually burn themselves out, even if this burning out still results in billions dead worldwide. The threat of a zombie apocalypse is what will happen just as a pandemic flu outbreak starts to burn itself out. Government officials are aware that a pandemic zombie outbreak will still burn itself out IF and only if the military can prevent any zombie hives from becoming established. The military facilities I mentioned previously such as Camp Pendleton and Fort Hood, will start sending out zombie outbreak response teams and special forces teams to comb the apocalyptic landscape to begin eradicating zombies, dealing with loose assholes, and to begin looking for hive activity.
What is a zombie hive?
You wouldn’t be asking this question if you read my zombie outbreak response guide, Zombie Hive Incident. I’ll talk about hives next, but I’m not going to repeat everything from the hive guide. So look it up that guide and read it.
{Return to Table of Contents}
Zombie Hive FAQs:
I’ve said it before, the first key to your survival is information. That’s my mission, to provide you with tons of zombie info, which I hope increases your chances of survival.
What follows next are FAQs from my previous book, Zombie Outbreak Survival: Hive Incident #83-2005. Instead of having you flip back and forth between books, I thought I would just add the FAQs from the Hive Incident here so you can stay on track preparing for The Definitive Test.
In “Zombie Hive Incident”, I shared my notes from a zombie outbreak response mission debriefing I attended in 2005. One of my Special Operations Capable (SOC) Nuclear Biological Chemical (NBC) Zombie Outbreak Response Teams (ZORT), all together a SOCNBCZORT or simply a ZORT platoon, responded to a Level V zombie outbreak event in a little city in eastern Romania. Zombie outbreak incident #83-2005 was contained and the ZORT performed exactly as I trained it to perform. Please read my book if you haven’t already. The book describes how Lieutenant Martin’s ZORT platoon intervened to contain a high level zombie outbreak, which was caused when biothieves broke into an illegal zombie z-tech facility.
These FAQs are important because you need to know what to look for and what to expect. Zombie hives are inevitable in a full blown global zombie pandemic event. I’m including this information so you will know how to survive when it happens and it will happen. You can skip all these FAQs if you dare and go straight to The Definitive Test in the next chapter. I don’t recommend that. Keep reading right here.
In Hive Incident #83-2005, Part I, why did Lieutenant Martin kill those people in the tunnel? I don’t think he had to do that.
In the zombie outbreak response business, a Level IV or higher zombie outbreak is handled differently than lower levels. In lower levels, we might send in a response agent or a small team to help local service providers prevent a more serious outbreak. Responders take samples and document sources of the outbreak and the results of response actions for reporting to the CDC.
For a Level IV or higher outbreak, when the DOD and the CDC decide to send in a ZORT, a special operations capable, platoon-sized or larger, combat-ready Nuclear Biological Chemical (NBC) response team, it means that preserving local human life is a secondary priority to containment and decontamination. It’s like saying that once a Level IV outbreak is identified, the local people become fully expendable. Since containment was the highest priority, those people were technically already dead when Lt. Martin got there.
Finding survivors, Lt. Martin could have ignored them all, but he chose to get thousands of them to safety. In doing this, he encountered resistance from a few local political leaders, clan leaders, and also from a few random gangsters. This is very typical in most outbreak scenarios. ZORTs are trained to deal with zombies, mutant zombies, hives, assholes, and non-threatening civilians.
We train all ZORT platoon commanders like Lt. Martin, to make fast decisions. If he decided that any person (infected or not) in the vicinity of a Level IV outbreak posed some risk to the success of the ZORT or to the overall mission of containment, then he had the full authority to exercise maximum force on these people. In fact, responders are trained to not waste time and to not take chances.
In this incident, Lt. Martin decided on a frequently used tactic to quell unrest. He killed the leaders, publically. This had the desired effect; it motivated the other survivors to move their asses and to avoid interfering. You may think of multiple different ways of handling a situation like this, but different is not necessarily better or smarter. Given any number of factors to consider in a Level IV situation like this, a ZORT Commander must act in the best interest of speed, contai
nment, and decontamination.
A ZORT operations review board (ORB), reviews every ZORT mission, all actions, losses of life, and uses of weapons. The ORB for this outbreak response found Lt. Martin’s actions were justified, within training parameters, and within operational standards. He may have killed a half dozen or more people, but that just may have been the key to saving the thousands who were evacuated after that, saving the city, saving some of the illegal Z-tech for further studying, and saving countless more people in the region who would have been harmed by a failed containment, not to mention, saving the world from a massive zombie pandemic event.
The ZORT platoon commander is expertly trained to deal with zombies, crazed survivors, loud, rude, obnoxious politicals, and any bad guys (commonly referred to as assholes) looking to take advantage of survivors. We would never select someone to be a ZORT platoon commander if their skills and abilities in such situations were suspect. A Level IV or higher zombie outbreak event is no place to be a pussy.
In Zombie Hive Incident #83-2005, Part I, Sergeant Jackson was bitten by a zombie, but he did not become a zombie. Why not?
Some people have natural Z-virus immunities. Very early in US military service, recruits go through a broad cadre of medical tests and screenings. All ZORT team members are identified as Z-virus resistant in boot camp. Military medicine found a way to boost natural Z-virus immunities using the anthrax-Z inoculation series, which was administered beginning in 1990. ZORT team members are practically immune to the most basic strains of the Z-virus. Their immunities far exceed normal human immunities.
When the zombie bit Sgt. Jackson, he had a reaction; he became feverish, and he was infected. He eventually fully recovered, the only symptoms experienced being mild flu-like. By the way, the US military also identifies all recruits who carry the dormant Z-virus. There are a certain statistical number of people walking around today who carry the Z-virus and the overwhelming majority of them will never know they are carriers. The overwhelming majority of them will never reanimate because reanimation is complicated and hardly guaranteed.