The Zombie Mulcher

A recent discussion brought up the topic of the preferred zombocalypse survival vehicle.  It’s an interesting thought,really — what is your contingency plan for when the undead horde begins swarming our streets?  How will you move about?  What will be your choice of locomotion that is sufficiently fast to escape the shambling legions of moaning ghouls lusting to tear you to shreds?

To wit, some criteria:

Speed

It’s got to be fast enough to get away from zombies, both slow and fast (I’m unabashedly of the “slow zombie” school, but you can never know.  Semper paratus.)  Not only that, but you’ll want sufficient speed to forage across ever-wider areas as the neighborhood goes merrily to hell in a handbasket.  And, of course, once civilization completely collapses upon itself, you’ll need the ability to escape post-apocalyptic roving biker gangs.  More on those later.

Robustness

When the dead rise from the grave and the infection spreads, you’ll most likely have to deal with grasping fangs and claws tearing at your vehicle, always facing the danger of being tipped over or catching a rotting fist through your windshield.  Avoid large windows, flimsy body construction, anything light enough to be knocked on its side without the speed to avoid this ignominious fate, easily punctured radiator grilles and tires (you’ll most likely value the ability to plow head-on through substantial mobs of ghouls, and while a random bit of tibia or rib cage might make a fine hood ornament, they’re not so much fun when rammed into a crucial piece of machinery at high speed.)

Not only that, but unless your chosen mode of locomotion lends itself to welding all kinds of crap onto the outside (armor plating, swords, buffalo horns, etc.), good luck protecting yourself from the inevitable rival mobs of survivors, hell-bent on thieving your ill-gotten gains (or just getting the hell away from the zombies — and, no matter how big a humanitarian you may be, having 50 overweight mall-dwellers, some of whom are indubitably already infected, trying to scramble into your whip isn’t going to do much for your survivability.)

Reliability

The crew of the local Midas franchise are more likely to want to gnaw on your brain than fix your muffler.   Most of us aren’t trained mechanics, and while it’s not so far out to expect lone survivors to learn how to use a welding torch (pure natural selection there — those who can’t figure this out will probably end up in a highly amusing but ultimately undesirable manner), you won’t have anything much more high tech than that for repairs.

In fact, forget about blow torches, plan on having to effect repairs with a hammer and some string.  Sure, it’d be awesome when the V-TEC just kicked in, yo, but zombie entrails tend to clog turbocharger blower intakes something awful.  Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Availability

That’s right — you have to realistically be able to get your hands on one.

Capacity

Loot is key.  Any zombie survival vehicle (aside from the perfectly valid dirt bike + samurai sword combination, which, if you survive it, will naturally garner you lots of kudos and style points from other survivors — take care not to get splattered with too much suppurating ichor, that stuff’s bad news.

Mobility

All-terrain is an absolute must.  As much as it pains me to think that I might not be able to exploit the downfall of society to finally hotwire my dream car and go apeshit on the sweet, slick highways of Europe, this is one area where a bit of excessive pragmatism goes a long, long way.  Hitting a pile of rotting corpses while doing 260 violates several significant dicta of road safety, and boy, wouldn’t you feel stupid trying to extricate yourself from your crumpled, burning Testarossa while surrounded by teeth-gnashing zombies.

So, heavy tires, high ground clearance, lots of torque.  And no tracked vehicles — there is a reason why tanks are taxied to and from battle in relative creature comfort.

Flexibility

There most probably won’t be many opportunities to gas up, since petrol refineries will either have become last-stand charnel houses, or are likely to have been fortified by their panicked crews into flamethrower-studded impregnable fortresses where you’ll only receive a full tank in return for ammo, a virgin female, or some similarly precious barter supplies.  So make sure you’re able to run on whatever’s handy and comparatively easy to refine — from biodiesel to salad oil.  Hay seems like a fine alternative as well.

Where does all that leave us?

Probably in the domain of the professionals, i.e. military.  They’re the guys most usually confronted with having to drive over piles of rubble and dead dudes, and other unsavory requirements (like things blowing up all around without blowing up the car along with it.)  So I’ve limited down the choices a bit:

Land Rover Defender long-wheelbase (turbo-diesel).  Slab-sided, ideally.   Designed for running crap down while having angry natives chuck spears at the King’s Own Cannon Fodder Regiment — you have to assume that it’d survive a bunch of undead morons beating on the door.

UNIMOG S404.   Yeah, this thing is just awesome.   German engineering and all that jazz.  Check out the tires.

Then, there are the usual suspects: Humvee, Ford F-450, Toyota Land Cruiser, Mack Truck (imagine one of those as a KILL MOBILE), US Army M35 Deuce and a Half, Aton Impulse Viking, and a plethora of Mine Resistant Vehicles (MRAP).  Unfortunately, except for the Ford and Land Cruiser, there isn’t much of a chance you’ll be able to pop down to the dealership and pick up one of these.  Really unfortunately.  Indeed, someone suggested an ATF Dingo which, any zombie survival enthusiast will agree, sits pretty much among the royalty of wasteland-domination vehicles.   Again, though, the dastardly problem of availability.

Maybe I’ll run across one.  Maybe.  It’ll be like stumbling on the holy grail, especially when I get around to welding an automatic cannon to the roof.  Then, let the fun begin.

This brings us to the issue of approaching the Zombocalypse.

But John, you ask, what about the actual daily grind of surviving in a zombie-infested wasteland?
Good question, actually.

I can definitely see the romantic attraction of leading a nomadic ninja lifestyle, roaming around the countryside on a dirt bike or even a bicycle (true, no gas there, but given that a reasonably robust, slightly modified diesel can probably run on anything from heating oil to Canola — assuming you and your heroic band of survivors can’t put together a credible raiding assault on anything more fuel-equipped than a looted supermarket — for several thousand miles.)  However, I’m the kind of person who likes to play goalie in team sports, who has always had this attraction for big, lumbering battleships rather than torpedo boats, and as such, I’d probably gamble on hunkering down in zombie-proof fortress rather than trying to head North where the zombies will freeze for at least 6 months per year, allowing me to nimbly ski among them with my Louisville Slugger and play mailbox baseball with their heads.

Nosirree, a castle is the way to go.  And while one of the above vehicular options would definitely be desirable for foraging and general mobility, at some point the pathetic, ragged remnants of humanity will have to consider taking the field to rid the Earth of the undead plague.

At some point during World War II, the British realized that one of the best ways to clear German mines was to attach a big bunch of chains to the front of a tank, and make them hit the ground, real fast.

Considering that, according at least to Max Brooks, zombies attract each other by moaning loudly the moment they spot anything moving and potentially edible, I should quickly attract an appreciable horde the moment I start making any kind of noise, it stands to follow that, well, big fun.

But John, you ask, what about the mountains of corpses you’ll leave behind?  Won’t that spread disease and pestilence?

Be a bit more imaginative, please.  The idea would be to take a flail like the above, weld it to the front of a reasonably armored agricultural tractor, and hook a turf aerator or tow-along mulcher to the back of it.  Voilà, instant fertilizer!  And the beauty of it is, once you learn to weld (see above), this can all be assembled with standard farm implements easily found on any country estate whose erstwhile inhabitants are busy trying to suck brains from someone not as technologically astute or needlessly aggressive as yourself.

Some basic calculations lead us to the belief that, assuming reasonably densely packed zombies (see the bit about moaning), you could estimate 3-5 zombies mulched per second. Let’s say an average of 200 per minute. 12,000 per hour.  So assuming an 8 hour “work” day, including a break for lunch and refueling, you’d turn the entire zombified population of Paris into finely ground fertilizer within about 3 weeks. And that’s conservative. And with one single killdozer.  Except that it wouldn’t really be a killdozer, because they’re already dead — so maybe a re-killdozer.  Dirty work, but 100% guilt-free!  Saving the world through technology, a thousand zombies at a time, that’s our motto.