Test Post and Apocalypse Survival
Oct. 9th, 2010 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynSo I've been meaning to post something for a while, because I need to test this whole Dreamwidth->LJ sort of posting thing. And I thought, why don't I actually post something useful? After all, there are a whole bunch of things that people talk about without actually knowing something about that I may actually know something about, and that some people might, someday, find useful. That would fulfill my court-mandated community service urge to help my fellow man (or woman).
So here it is, just like those films you used to watch as kids which taught you not to buy drugs from bad actors with poorly scripted lines (because they're probably Narcs) a Public Service Announcement on how to survive a zombie infestation.
So, you wake up one morning to a pounding at your door. Glancing out your bedroom window, you find yourself face to face with one of your worst nightmares (and that's including the one with the guy in the squirrel suit), zombies! An endless horde of the hungry, mindless, ravening undead pounding at your door, trying to get their decaying teeth into your soft, yielding flesh. You've got a split second before they break through the door to figure out what to grab, how to escape, what your chances of survival are, and whether you should bother to set your Tivo or not.
The key to surviving the next twenty-four hours/days/weeks/months is understanding your enemies. What are you up against? What are you running from?
Besides 'zombies'. That kind of smart-ass attitude may guarantee some chance of survival in the movies, but real life is much less forgiving.
Basically, there are three types of zombies. The most dangerous, intelligent, and persistent type of zombie is the auto-animated zombie. These are easily identifiable by the fact that they're waving signs that say things like “Equal Rights Now!”, and “You Can't Outlast Me”. In this case you've been besieged by members of the Committee for Undead Equality (the cue-balls), and not only have they likely surrounded your house, but they've probably already deployed batteries of lawyers to break through your defenses. You're probably doomed to suffer from a really boring lecture at this point.
The more short-lived threat (and the one more likely to leave you short-limbed), comes from the other two types of zombies, referred to as biological zombies (also virus zombies, or feral zombies), and necromantic zombies, sometimes known as voodoo zombies (a well known religious slur, created, ironically, by a bunch of vodun practitioners who like zombie movies), or the SPH (Stupid Person's Horde). Both zombies have their advantages and disadvantages, and both of them are generally prey to one problem:
Physics is a Bitch; Especially to Zombies
The common problem with zombies is that they, like everything else in the world, are responsible to the laws of physics. Physics believes in vigilante justice; if you try to violate physics you don't get a trial. And zombies, who use physical attacks to rend their victims, have a distinct reliance on physics to get the job done.
Physical motion, whether it's pulling people apart, or trying to claw through your impromptu picnic table barricade, requires energy. The human body is largely a very complex engine that processes and stores energy, giving you the ability to move, to run, and to scream like a little girl as you're chased out into the night. Unfortunately, dead people don't do the same thing. The human body, even dead, can operate for limited amounts of time off stores built up in the body. Extremely limited. You can operate at some level for up to a month without food, and go as much as several days without water, both of which are enough to spread havoc and terror. However, you can only go a very limited amount of time without oxygen.
Very limited.
In the human body this is handled by a rather complex system that includes the lungs and the repertory system, which get oxygen inside your body and carbon dioxide out, and the circulatory system, which transports it to the muscles that actually burn it. This system does not work well when you're dead, which is why even though the dead can spasm, they find it difficult to run marathons. Zombies that cannot handle this problem tend to last about sixty seconds before they drop in a small, cramped puddle and stay there.
To overcome the basic problem of zombies, two separate, popular approaches have been developed.
Biological Zombies: Theory and Practice
Biological zombies are the current zombie of choice for Hollywood. Biologicals overcome the whole 'human body as complex machine' problem by leaving the host alive. Scientists reasoned that, for the purpose of creating ravening hordes, it didn't matter whether the body was alive or dead, only that the brain was dead. By inducing a high fever, a specific set of biological reactions, or creating even more complications a body can be put into a state where its higher thought functions are completely disabled, reducing it to little more then a feral animal. This is easiest to do through a specially engineered virus, which also leads to the second point, the zombie “effect” can be spread the same way a virus can, usually by exchange of bodily fluid.
With special tweaks to the virus you can induce an insatiable hunger for raw meat, fresh raw meat, meaning that the newly zombie-fied will find themselves quickly transmitting the virus. The zombies can also now emit a particular pheromone which marks them as rotten to other zombies, ensuring that there are very few friendly-on-friendly kills. By making the virus fast-acting (in order to prevent containment when contagion becomes common knowledge) you ensure a fairly rapid transmission vector.
Within hours of being contaminated, a human being begins to suffer the initial stages of zombiefication, usually the high fever as the brain is slowly reduced to oatmeal. As their brain regresses they become more and more savage; adrenaline levels keep rising in their body, hormone levels go wildly out of whack, and they lose any idea of who they are. They also become very, very hungry. At the point where they are willing to eat raw flesh, the damage to their brain has exceeded the point of return. From that moment on they are simply flesh-eating monsters, eager to sink their teeth into any flesh available to it, and to spread their monstrous disease.
Biological Zombies: Unexpected Side Effects
Biologicals are still alive; their ability to control their bodies are approximately the same as an underdeveloped child, depending. Given the progression of the virus, zombies can be classified on a long and convoluted scale of development.
The most unexpected side effect has to do with sex. Until they become drones, biological zombies still experience the vestiges of sexual attraction. Heterosexual male zombies are attracted to female targets, as heterosexual female zombies are attracted to male targets. Limited experiments with late homosexuals has yielded similar (reversed) results. This does not turn into something from a bad porno; zombies at this stage are far too degraded mentally to remember what sexual attraction means. Instead they behave more like children on the verge of puberty, fascinated by the opposite sex (or same sex), but endlessly confused about why. The only difference is that when they gang up on you, instead of pulling your hair, they'll rip out your throat.
Another unexpected side effect has to do with muscle memory and mechanical aptitude. Even with the higher thought functions degraded, zombies still retain some basic memory of how to do what they did in their life. When bereft of any hope of prey, early-stage zombies will return to jobs, will begin to do their household chores, and can often be found returning to their homes to wait for something to happen. Some zombies actually remember the basic way that the world works at the time of their zombie-fication, but that stage rarely lasts. More then one zombie infection has been wiped out when the newly minted zombies all piled into a truck to try and drive to the next town.
Also, even late-stage zombies appear to remember what rhythm is. They dance like stickfigure marionettes being controlled by a drunk hippo, but they do react interestingly to regular beats. It's not enough to distract them from chowing down on the nearest human, but it has led to a lot of speculation about the origin of music.
Biological Zombies: Weaknesses and Counters
The biggest advantage of biologicals is that they're alive. They manage all that circulatory and breathing business just fine, they know how to move, they're fast, and actually reasonably clever (as far as monkeys go). The biggest disadvantage is that they're alive, and they're very, very stupid.
Because they depend on the circulatory system, biologicals can bleed to death. Although legend has it that you can only kill them by destroying the head, major damage to a vein or artery will result in bleeding out in the same amount of time that it takes humans. Biologicals often tax their body in order to achieve high levels of physical performance, at the same time shutting down their body's natural responses (such as pain, which is disturbing to most zombies). Although this helps in the short run infect-as-many-people-as-you-can sprint, it's detrimental in the long term. It turns out that all that immune system stuff actually does something. With it disabled, and with the normal responses like fever and exhaustion turned to off, the body suffers a lot more problems then you would imagine.
Injured zombies lack any knowledge of disinfectant and hygiene, leading to infections of gangrene on still-attached limbs. Since zombies are normally infected with a bite wound in the first place, they start with a significant handicap in the 'surviving disease' category. Zombies exposed to wilderness conditions suffer from heatstroke, fever, and pneumonia as do normal humans; however, they don't suffer any of the symptoms. They simply keep walking until they fall over, the fact that they keep pushing themselves contributing to their collapse. Over the years more zombies have died of pneumonia then all counter-measures combined. More zombies have been disabled by tripping and breaking their legs then all the chainsaw-inflicted mayhem we could imagine.
Biological zombies can do only the things that humans can do. In fact they can't do everything that a human can do, lacking memories of what that actually is. Attempts by zombies to carry out flying leaps between one building and another usually end in zombie pancakes. A zombie can no more pry a door off of its hinges then you can, although they might be able to use crude tools. Biologicals can walk along the bottom of a lake, for about two minutes. Some of them can swim in the early stages. By the later stages, it just gets stupid.
The second largest weakness of biologicals is the transmission vector; zombies spread to other zombies via exchange of fluid (airborne zombie-fication keeps burning out too fast). Unless you have a thing for kissing zombies (or in the case of more difficult viruses, necrophilia), the only way in which the disease gets transferred is through biting or scratching. In order to induce this, most viruses are engineered to create the proper mix of hormones that leads to the hunger for fresh flesh.
The problem here should be manifest. If a zombie is found by a group of uninfected humans, it stands a good chance of inflicting several wounds, even on humans it does not immediately feast on, in the surprise attack. However, as the infection spreads, the numbers of zombies rise and the number of humans in the immediate area drops. Humans caught by zombies are much more likely to be simply devoured. If each human puts up a fight and disables one zombie, the net effect is that each human caught will disable one zombie and then be completely devoured, shrinking the horde. Biological zombie infestations tend to peak, because their ability to spread geographically is extremely limited, and the moment that the population of zombies becomes similar in size to the population of prey, the whole thing falls apart.
Necromantic Zombies: The Idiot's Guide to Ravening Hordes
The other way to get around the physics problem is just to subvert it completely and power the whole body by magic. Sufficiently complicated magic can completely re-animate a human body after death; after all, the cells can be revived (calling the soul back, however, is a much trickier procedure). However, most people who make zombies are content just to infuse the body with magic and make it do what you want.
The benefits of using an external energy source are legion. For one thing, the strength and power of a zombie is then equivalent to how much energy you pour into them. This allows zombies to perform super-human feats, leap tall buildings, rip apart brick walls, even play Flight of the Bumblebee one-handed. For another thing you dispense with all the weaknesses of those pesky biologicals; they can't be killed, they can reanimate as long as there's something to animate, they don't require muscle fiber, brains, or really anything else. They change from simple, infected humans into monsters of absolute destruction.
Necromantic zombies obey their master's commands absolutely. When turned loose, they obey their last order, destroying towns, ravaging countrysides, and laying waste to anyone who has dared incur their master's wrath. Unstoppable, they descend on a countryside like the plague, and your only hope is either to flee before them, or to hide where they don't even notice you. Otherwise defenses, barricades, and weapons will only slow the inevitable.
Necromantic Zombies: Why This is a Stupid Idea
Of course, necromantic zombies have hardly conquered the world. This is because using necromancy to animate a zombie in a plot for world domination (or if you're a nihlist, world annihilation), is the stupidest idea since the hybrid Hummer. In fact, even proposing the use of necromantic zombies for anything other then artistic license is sufficient information to get you expelled from the League of Evil Sorcerers, and is considered to be failing the intelligence test.
The first, last, and largest problem is that when a necromancer raises zombies, they empower the zombies at the same time. That means that the numbers and strengths of the zombies risen is entirely dependent on the necromancer. Every iota of energy a zombie expends, battering down barricades, absorbing shotgun blasts, and doing the tango, costs the necromancer who is acting as their permanent generator. The more zombies you have, the weaker they get, and the stupider they get, because the necromancer has less and less time and ability to devote to controlling each one. Even if he keeps the power conduits open, you have to pay attention. A zombie ordered to chase down a person will batter itself to pieces on a concrete wall if the target manages to get into a bunker, if you're not paying attention.
A C-ranked necromancer can raise up to five or so zombies at the superhuman strength level, a B-ranked necromancer can do many, many more. An A-ranked necromancer can raise an army. A small army, but an army nonetheless. Each corpse takes a lot of killing, but there are only a limited number of them, and if you do deal enough damage, they physically disintegrate. This forces the necromancer to replace them, which is usually a lot harder then it looks. And takes energy. Think of a necromancer like a bank account; every day that he operates at army-level he's probably burning about a year's worth of savings.
This has been the downfall of necromantic zombie hordes. Any serious attempt to raise an army that you power requires you to keep powering it. This attempt just doesn't scale. Even keeping your horde moderately active requires a huge investment in energy, that could be better invested in other things, like running away from the inevitable counterattack.
Necromantic zombies can be killed directly, but they take a lot of killing. High gauge firearms are highly recommended, especially the REDACTED or the REDACTED. Some manuals recommend direct fire from a REDACTED, but I don't, since hitting your target too close to the barrel can result in a release of REDACTED radiation sufficient to sterilize an area approximately the size of REDACTED. Conventional firearms are not much use, although anything that can be used to kill tanks can kill most zombies. Swords and other cutting implements are actually rather good here. A zombie with no arms is not immobilized, but he's unlikely to be able to grab you.
Nightmare Scenario: The Hybrid Horde
The conventional solution to the zombie problem (namely that zombies aren't a problem) is the Hybrid Horde. The Hybrid Horde depends on a core of necromantic zombies imbued with high damage resistance and endurance, each of whom carries a zombie virus. The necromantic zombies, using superhuman strength and speed, launch attacks that end up infecting anyone they strike, allowing them to become mobile vectors for the disease. This creates a horde of biological living zombies arranged around, and pheromonally enthralled by, a group of “zombie lords”. It allows you to utilize your indestructible juggernauts to spread plague through enemy ranks, except that the plague turns them into killers in their own right. You don't wait for the plague, you are the plague.
The Hybrid Horde requires the perpetrators to have sufficient knowledge of both necromancy and genetic engineering to create both ends of the delivery mechanism, so one is extremely rare. They also require a great deal of control and subtlety to control, because a Hybrid Horde is a B or A level threat, and is responded to accordingly.
Countering the Horde: Threat Level B
The general rule is that a B-level threat is capable of exterminating a good sized town. A necromancer with a horde of zombies can level a mid-sized town assuming that it's isolated from the outside. A plague that causes biological zombies can destroy one in about a week, and can spread beyond the city limits within hours.
Either the necromantic or biological zombie usually requires a sorcerer of B-rank to create and manage, fine tuning the horde or the genetics of the disease (sometimes on the fly) is usually impossible to a lower-ranked sorcerer by definition. However, it should come as no surprise that a B-ranked magician can be countered by another B-ranked magician.
Zombies are generally seen as an ineffective, poor man's tool, like frightening natives with firecrackers, effective against people unprepared for them, but relatively ineffective against more determined opponents. Necromantic zombies are simply human bodies infused with magic to allow movement, there is no real difference between using magic to animate a dozen human corpses, or using magic to animate a dozen killer robots with Austrian accents. And the zombie bite is ineffective against steel hulls. The human body is actually pretty flimsy; if you want only brute strength and brute power, you would be wise to create a creature that isn't based on a decaying human. If you have to pick a vessel for the power of a thousand screaming dead souls, a single human corpse usually isn't the one you would pick.
Necromantic zombies are vulnerable to any sort of jamming that cuts them off from their creator. Smart necromancers create subroutines that allow them to function when cut off from home base, but that subroutine is, of necessity, limited (for most people, those for whom it isn't limited are beyond the subject of this document). They are not vulnerable too, but certainly not resistive too, destructive magics, including fireballs, concussive force, summoned creatures, enchanted weapons, and, well, basically anything that works on humans. They also lack a human's native abilities, their versatility and creativity.
Biological zombies, although harder to track because they don't show up on sense as magical puppets, are even more vulnerable. Biological zombies are incapable of generating the necessary force to pierce physical shields, or defensive auras. They are vulnerable to poisons, to blades, to invisible assassins, to summoned hunter-killers, basically to anything that humans are vulnerable to. The response to B-level threats includes a great many of people employed by Tactical who are used to orders like “go to location X and kill everyone there”. If everyone there is a zombie, that only makes things easier.
A debate has arisen about proper doctrine to use when dealing with a hybrid horde. Normally horde containment has been the first priority, but in certain cases people have hypothesized that it's easier to cut off the head, eliminate the driving necromancer, and then deal with the horde afterwards. Upon deployment of a response team, the decision on how to proceed is left to the discretion of the team leader, pending approval by the Operations Board.
Eliminating the Horde: A-level Threats
There are very few A-level necromancers. All of those who made it to that level don't bother messing around with zombies, they craft their own eldritch horrors out of the shadows of life. But a coven of B-level necromancers could theoretically make an A-level regional threat.
Consider a comprehensive Hybrid Horde attack on a place like California. Two dozen necromancers, each maneuvering their own group of necromantic zombies, would launch simultaneous attacks on crowded venues all over the state, each necromancer concentrating on a separate community. Each necromancer would be supported by a sorcerer of some other type, to mask their operation, jam communications, and reduce the kind of panic that makes things disorganized. Necromantic zombies would appear in music venues, sports events, and crowded shopping districts as raving lunatics, jumping at, biting, and scratching as many people as possible. Some of those people would be transported to hospitals, but most would probably brush it off as some damned fool crazy stunt. The police would be dispatched after what would probably be reported as the weirdest cult crime in California, although they would have little luck.
Within two hours, symptoms would begin to appear among the effected, fevers would begin that would, within an hour, produce the first force of biological zombies. The symptoms appear minor, most of the victims go have a lie down, or go seal themselves in a bathroom (it can make you feel nauseated), or try to take a nap. Within half an hour they are incapacitated. Just as people start to worry, they come alive again, and start to attack.
At the moment the first reports come in, the second attack starts. The zombies still leading the police on turn around and attack their pursuers, eliminating and infecting the first responders. Additional necromantic zombies crash into control centers, dispatch offices, and communication buildings, cutting most cities off from direct communication. California experiences a general crash of internet, telephone, and electrical services as the grid is overwhelmed. As this is happening hospitals, with the largest concentration of victims, become deathtraps as biological zombies flood their halls.
By the time most people become aware that this is more then a blackout, the major response units have been eliminated, central communication is gone, all medical help is mostly in control of the undead, and the horde is spreading from hundreds of points simultaneously. If supporting sorcerers can seal off roadways in and out, the high urban and suburban density in California will lead to the population approaching termination within hours.
This is the power of a group of B-level magicians working together. A group of only a hundred B-rank magicians can possibly depopulate the state of California in one single stroke, leaving only a fraction of millions of people left alive.
An organization like North American Combat Command's First Heavy Assault Brigade has almost two thousand B-ranks. NACC's ready combat brigade automatically releases their expeditionary battalion (whichever one is on rota) for deployment the moment an A-level emergency is declared. If the situation accelerated to Red-Two (which the destruction of California would authorize), the entire Brigade is automatically deployed in lieu of an Operation veto. One-HAB carries enough firepower to level essentially any attempt at launching a hybrid horde attack, short of the intervention of extraplanar entities. Sufficiently talented magicians can formulate antiviral agents on the fly, cut off all communications between necromantic zombies, and deploy entire armies of things that are very, very good at killing zombies.
Zombies are sometimes the magical equivalent of mounted police; very effective at crowd control of mostly-unarmed crowds. If you're going to go up against an enemy army though, they're mostly useless, and we have a lot of firepower sitting around with nothing to do other then find other people and hurt them. Even without our intervention, of course, sooner or later someone would just nuke the epicenter and lance the wound. Which is why, though there are continual demonic invasions, and constant skirmishing against evil cabals of magicians who spend most of their time playing politics, nobody really worries about zombie invasions.
What You Should Do
None of which really affects you. You have no say in how fast or how slow (or if at all) a coordinated response appears to the zombie menace. They're at your door.
Your answer is to get out of your house. Zombies of both types are profoundly distance limited. Because zombie infestations are limited, the greatest danger they pose is if you are within easy grabbing distance of their epicenter. The first instinct of many people is to fort up, find somewhere fairly safe where they can meet up with their friends and neighbors and await help. Their second instinct is often to go around in the area and raid stores for weapons, chainsaws, and food supplies. All of these concerns should be secondary to getting out.
Zombies are only dangerous if they can find you. They can only find you if they are where you are. Because both types of zombie infections spread so slowly, putting a geographical barrier between you and them is paramount. Yes, it's nice to stop by the local gun store and pick up a lot of firearms, but the truth is, you don't need them nearly as much as you need to be about a hundred miles away. If you can shoot a zombie, he's way the hell too close to you.
Second, don't fall out of touch. Take your cell phone, some cell towers may be up. Take a radio, battery powered if possible. The one in your car should work fine. Stay in touch. Avoiding zombies is easiest if you know where they are, and it's easiest to know where they are if you can at least listen to broadcasts from friendly groups. If you can, coordinate, but do not group. As tempting as it seems to gather yourself and your allies and engage zombies directly in some sort of full-scale war, this is foolhardy. Don't provide tempting targets.
And third, even when away, stay mobile. Be prepared to vacate at the first sign of something you can't handle; have escape routes mapped out. Discretion is the better part of valor. Be prepared to leave, be prepared to react in a state of emergency. That's how you stay alive.
Every once in a while, you can't leave. You're stuck in town. Maybe you can find no transportation, maybe the zombie epicenters are around you and you don't know where they are. In this case you're stuck, you have to confront the zombies. The three principles still matter; move towards regions with minimal zombie concentrations first thing, stay in touch with other groups, but don't form up with them to provide a more tempting target. And be ready to run the moment you hear people clawing at the door.
Surviving a Virus Outbreak
Biological zombies are basically humans with greater endurance. Given the state of the average suburbanite, a group of zombies has a maximum travel time of about forty miles a day. They have about a week's endurance at this rate before the stress begins to severely degrade their performance. Therefore, the best place to be is at least three hundred miles from the epicenter. This is equivalent to a full tank of gas in many vehicles, assuming filling stations are down. If you can, carpool, and combine the gas in your vehicles, or store excess gas in containers.
Safety in this case is dependent on the weather. You're far more likely to survive a zombie infestation in winter or the heat of summer then in the temperate late spring and early fall. Keep this in mind when you've made your first hundred miles. As counter-intuitive as it may seem to many people with wilderness experience, the harsher the weather is, the more dangerous the terrain, the safer you will be. If you are traveling with someone who has significant outdoor experience, use that to the best of your advantage.
Biological zombies also tend to fall victim to human fallacies, even more so since they're profoundly limited. When presented with two trails, one going uphill and one going downhill, they tend to pick the downhill one. They avoid the hard way and go the easy way. The more remote the location you end up at, the more likely it is that the zombies will just wander the other way. Remember that in the wilderness you have the advantage, even the most pampered, out-of-shape, and inexperienced suburbanite is much more likely to survive in the wilderness then a biological zombie. You at least have the sense to cover up.
Weapons are nice, and if presented with the opportunity you should go and gather them, but your primary defense is mobility. If you're shooting at zombies, you've done something wrong. People are better then weapons; ideally you want enough people in your group that you can have two of three people awake at all times without courting exhaustion. Early warning is better for long term survival then firepower.
Despite my warnings, thinning out the herd can be beneficial. Lone zombies are easily dispatched, but the bodies must be disposed of. The pheromone that makes zombies unappetizing to other zombies often fades with death, and the body can then attract hungrier, desperate zombies looking for flesh that's at least warm. Nevertheless, a lone zombie is still a threat, and if you believe that you can eliminate it, then do so at your leisure. Just beware; it could have been the outskirts of a major horde.
There is one massive exception to this for North American readers. Do NOT under any circumstances attempt to try this in either southern Alaska, or on the northern coast of Canada. No matter how experienced a woodsman you are, no matter how good you think you are at surviving in the woods, you are simply not good enough. Biological human zombies have weaknesses because humans are largely a subtropical species without the biological adaptations to survive in the environments they now live in. Infected kodiak and polar bears do not suffer from the same constraints. An insane, flesh eating, adrenaline suffused kodiak bear is faster then you are, often even in an automobile, and is resistant to many firearms. Zombie-infected kodiak bears are beyond anyone who does not have their second grade qualification in either firearms or melee weapons. If you do find yourself in those regions, you better get to sea, and fast.
(A note, most American wilderness, and European wilderness is safe. For reasons currently unexplained by science, this effect is extremely limited. Only ten percent or less of all zombie viral progenitors are capable of making the species jump from humans to non-humans, even to primates. However, the effects on most animals are non-threatening. Herbivores appear to get very confused by infestation, although you may expect territorial and mating displays out of season. Pure carnivores appear to succumb to different instincts, it seems to actually reduce their normal urge to feed, and the average carnivore losses a great deal of weight. Only omnivores have aggressive reactions, and even there the per-species response seems mixed. Black bears, for instance, begin to increasingly succumb to the 'flight' instinct in fight-or-flight).
Surviving a Necromantic Horde
Often necromancers have a limited range of control. And given that creating a horde of necromantic zombies and turning them loose on the population is tantamount to waving a giant “Please Kick My Ass!” sign in the direction of the nearest Bureau office, often necromancers don't want their zombies to get too far from home. This makes getting away just as imperative. If you can double the distance from the epicenter, they have four times as much area to search to find you.
Unfortunately, finding a remote location away from a necromantic horde is much more difficult then dealing with a biological horde. While a biological horde shuffles sort of aimlessly around looking for dinner, a necromantic horde is controlled by a person who can read maps. If you find yourself in a position where you can't just keep walking, such as being trapped on a small island, you have to engage in a game of cat and mouse. You're trying to figure out where he isn't going to look, he's trying to figure out where you think he's not going to look.
There is only one key here, stay away from other people. Presumably, a necromancer who is actively sending zombies out into populated regions has “killing people” on his to-do list. In that case, when presented with many possible targets, he is likely to pick the one that yields the most reward, and the highest head count. If you are caught in large groups, be prepared to scatter at the first sign of a necromantic zombie, even as fast as it is it can only pursue one person at a time.
Do not attempt to engage necromantic zombies. It is impossible to tell the power level of a necromantic zombie, even using previous experience. Imagine a necromancer with a horde of a hundred zombies under her control. Her power is split equally between all hundred zombies. Now imagine that you and your ambitious friends manage to ambush one of them, running it over with a car and then finishing it off with repeated shotgun blasts that blow the flesh apart. You might try to ambush another one. Meanwhile, now the necromancer knows where you are. She can drain the power temporarily out of ten of her zombies, rendering them almost inert, and put it all into a zombie sent stumbling into your area. This time, when you repeat the ambush, the zombie catches the car, rips it into two pieces, and proceeds to messily devour your brains.
If you absolutely must stay in the region with necromantic zombies, find someplace to hide. What you're trying to accomplish is to erase all obvious signs of your presence, so that they overlook you. This includes, sight, scent, and sound. Additionally, places where it is difficult to get at you are preferred, some necromancers don't want to use the energy. Unfortunately, most of the places that are good for this tend to be hard to get out of, for instance locked inside walk-in freezers, or sealed inside bank vaults.
If for some reason you must fight, or if you have managed somehow to arouse the necromancer's personal ire (don't sue them, it only makes them angry), you're going to need something heavy. Weapons are nice, but most weapons that aren't at least built for taking down armored vehicles are going to require too many shots to break through the defensive auras surrounding necromantic zombies. Generally you're looking for industrial equipment, everything from electrocution through your own diesel generator to the kind of welding and smelting equipment normally only found at steel processing plants. Whatever you use needs to be heavy, hot, or otherwise so dangerous that you can normally locate it by the number of warning signs on the door. Of course, the problem is that all these traps are hard to set up, hard to use, and difficult to adapt if the zombie in question decides to tunnel through the walls instead of coming in the door. But with enough expendable people to throw at the zombie in question, and enough explosives with people who know how to use it, you can usually hold out for at least some time.
Escaping Armageddon: The Hybrid Case
One of the reasons that escaping from a biological horde is recommended over fighting it directly is the complete inability of most people to be able to tell the difference between a biological and a hybrid horde. When using the standard approach, a hybrid horde uses its biological zombies as feelers, letting them roam freely in the hopes of finding and infecting (or devouring) lone humans, hopefully inducing humans to band together to resist them. Once the constant pressure of wandering biologicals has forced humans to band together and begin fighting back, necromantic zombies are sent in to deal with the resistance. All the human escapees see is a few scattered zombies in the street, right up until the point where hulking necromantics are ripping holes through the concrete wall.
The only real defense against a hybrid horde is to escape it. One advantage here is that a hybrid horde is generally deployed against a much larger area; often they need their biologicals to serve as their eyes and ears. Since the biologicals don't have very good eyes or ears, they can be avoided. Because they are accident prone, and not directly connected to the necromancer, one or two of them can be eliminated without anyone noticing, presuming that it's done quietly. If trapped in a limited geographic area that precludes escape, constant movement between reconnoitered safe houses is essential. Even so, even with detailed knowledge, you should still expect a 1-2% attrition rate due to random encounters. If you make a noise or cause a scene, scatter immediately.
If you have no hope of rescue, you have to improve your own odds. The only suggestible tactic for dealing with a hybrid horde is constant guerilla skirmishing to strip away the biological eyes and ears, traps set in the street, snipers who escape the moment the shot is fired, remote-detonated explosives. Coordinated forces can take advantage of distraction feints to lure away necromantic response forces while they kill more biologicals, but necromancers can learn too, and they think their biologicals are expendable.
The point of this is to wear thin the biological screen which the necromancer(s) are using to hold the region, forcing them to carry out constant reconnaissance with their core necromantic elements. This can make things difficult, since necromantic zombies are more dangerous, but it distributes them over a wider area, which is the only way to thin their numbers, since it is probably easier for the necromancer to replace one then it is for you to kill one. The entire point of this is to thin out the horde enough for a critical do-or-die strike at the horde's only weak point, the necromancers themselves. Given the vast number of explosive, poisonous, and otherwise deadly elements in the modern urban environment, it is entirely possible that you can kill the necromancer.
A brief calculation. A necromantic zombie at the upper end in quality can move at about 30 meters per second (60 mph). In dense terrain, there could be a necromantic zombie almost a kilometer from your position. Imagine you take a potshot at a zombie. Even in a city, this is audible, because it's quiet. Nobody's driving cars, nobody's flying planes, nobody's playing music. It can be heard. The speed of sound is about 340 m/sec, so it travels that kilometer in about 3 seconds. It then takes more then that (33 seconds) for the zombie to catch up to you. So, you have 36 seconds from the point at which you pull the trigger until the point where you have zombie in your face. That's 36 seconds to get sufficiently far from where you were to hide. Try that. Give yourself 36 seconds to find some place near where you are where somebody who can rip walls apart can't find you. Pretend your life depends on it.
Note that you only get one chance. Generally speaking, the number of forces required to provide this kind of striking power will use up all available living beings still in the region. If you fail, it's pretty much lights out. So make sure you have things planned out before you do it. Don't just rush in, although winging it has been known to work.
Conclusion
Most zombie guides describe how to make a self-sufficient fort and defend it. Don't do that. The length of a zombie infestation (or your ability to survive it) has been much exaggerated. In fact, for most people I don't even recommend stopping to get weapons, the temptation to try and use them may be just too much. Your primary defense is getting clear, getting away, and staying there. Delusions of cutting zombies to pieces with chainsaws, setting them ablaze with napalm torches, and blowing them apart with shotguns should be left to Hollywood.
Besides, zombies stink, and you really don't want to get any of that on you.
Addendum A: Proper Responses for Trained Personnel
If you've qualified for your B-rating, then you are, of course, supposed to disregard all previous advice. Many people are confused about what to do, a confusion that is understandable given the relative rarity of zombie invasions. Being thrown into something new is always disconcerting, especially when it's trying to kill you.
Your primary objective when facing a zombie intrusion is to even the odds while avoiding being dragged down. Anyone capable of wielding a baseball bat can take down a biological zombie if lucky, but necromantic zombies pose more of a threat. You cannot determine the magnitude of a necromancer's threat to yourself or those around you, but you can whittle down their forces of necromantic zombies on which they depend. Combat is similar to combat against any humanoid construct, with the added advantage that they shred much more easily.
Zombies are immune to most projected illusions, wards keyed against intelligent beings, and due to the advanced state of decay, most viral or bacterial weapons. Structurally they suffer the same disadvantages of the human body while retaining the peculiar pumping failure of the construct, being vulnerable to disintegration while performing high-speed maneuvers. Because of their tendency to be partially rotting they are vulnerable to concussion damage, including that from explosive and sonic techniques. However, sensory deprivation does not necessarily disable the zombie in question.
Also, beware of traps. Just because they're raising zombies instead of golems doesn't mean that they can't do golems either. I'm just sayin'
Keep your head clear and on your shoulders, engage under fire, and wait for help. Don't do something stupid. If you survive it, you'll have to deal with me, and I don't think you want to do that.
So here it is, just like those films you used to watch as kids which taught you not to buy drugs from bad actors with poorly scripted lines (because they're probably Narcs) a Public Service Announcement on how to survive a zombie infestation.
So, you wake up one morning to a pounding at your door. Glancing out your bedroom window, you find yourself face to face with one of your worst nightmares (and that's including the one with the guy in the squirrel suit), zombies! An endless horde of the hungry, mindless, ravening undead pounding at your door, trying to get their decaying teeth into your soft, yielding flesh. You've got a split second before they break through the door to figure out what to grab, how to escape, what your chances of survival are, and whether you should bother to set your Tivo or not.
The key to surviving the next twenty-four hours/days/weeks/months is understanding your enemies. What are you up against? What are you running from?
Besides 'zombies'. That kind of smart-ass attitude may guarantee some chance of survival in the movies, but real life is much less forgiving.
Basically, there are three types of zombies. The most dangerous, intelligent, and persistent type of zombie is the auto-animated zombie. These are easily identifiable by the fact that they're waving signs that say things like “Equal Rights Now!”, and “You Can't Outlast Me”. In this case you've been besieged by members of the Committee for Undead Equality (the cue-balls), and not only have they likely surrounded your house, but they've probably already deployed batteries of lawyers to break through your defenses. You're probably doomed to suffer from a really boring lecture at this point.
The more short-lived threat (and the one more likely to leave you short-limbed), comes from the other two types of zombies, referred to as biological zombies (also virus zombies, or feral zombies), and necromantic zombies, sometimes known as voodoo zombies (a well known religious slur, created, ironically, by a bunch of vodun practitioners who like zombie movies), or the SPH (Stupid Person's Horde). Both zombies have their advantages and disadvantages, and both of them are generally prey to one problem:
Physics is a Bitch; Especially to Zombies
The common problem with zombies is that they, like everything else in the world, are responsible to the laws of physics. Physics believes in vigilante justice; if you try to violate physics you don't get a trial. And zombies, who use physical attacks to rend their victims, have a distinct reliance on physics to get the job done.
Physical motion, whether it's pulling people apart, or trying to claw through your impromptu picnic table barricade, requires energy. The human body is largely a very complex engine that processes and stores energy, giving you the ability to move, to run, and to scream like a little girl as you're chased out into the night. Unfortunately, dead people don't do the same thing. The human body, even dead, can operate for limited amounts of time off stores built up in the body. Extremely limited. You can operate at some level for up to a month without food, and go as much as several days without water, both of which are enough to spread havoc and terror. However, you can only go a very limited amount of time without oxygen.
Very limited.
In the human body this is handled by a rather complex system that includes the lungs and the repertory system, which get oxygen inside your body and carbon dioxide out, and the circulatory system, which transports it to the muscles that actually burn it. This system does not work well when you're dead, which is why even though the dead can spasm, they find it difficult to run marathons. Zombies that cannot handle this problem tend to last about sixty seconds before they drop in a small, cramped puddle and stay there.
To overcome the basic problem of zombies, two separate, popular approaches have been developed.
Biological Zombies: Theory and Practice
Biological zombies are the current zombie of choice for Hollywood. Biologicals overcome the whole 'human body as complex machine' problem by leaving the host alive. Scientists reasoned that, for the purpose of creating ravening hordes, it didn't matter whether the body was alive or dead, only that the brain was dead. By inducing a high fever, a specific set of biological reactions, or creating even more complications a body can be put into a state where its higher thought functions are completely disabled, reducing it to little more then a feral animal. This is easiest to do through a specially engineered virus, which also leads to the second point, the zombie “effect” can be spread the same way a virus can, usually by exchange of bodily fluid.
With special tweaks to the virus you can induce an insatiable hunger for raw meat, fresh raw meat, meaning that the newly zombie-fied will find themselves quickly transmitting the virus. The zombies can also now emit a particular pheromone which marks them as rotten to other zombies, ensuring that there are very few friendly-on-friendly kills. By making the virus fast-acting (in order to prevent containment when contagion becomes common knowledge) you ensure a fairly rapid transmission vector.
Within hours of being contaminated, a human being begins to suffer the initial stages of zombiefication, usually the high fever as the brain is slowly reduced to oatmeal. As their brain regresses they become more and more savage; adrenaline levels keep rising in their body, hormone levels go wildly out of whack, and they lose any idea of who they are. They also become very, very hungry. At the point where they are willing to eat raw flesh, the damage to their brain has exceeded the point of return. From that moment on they are simply flesh-eating monsters, eager to sink their teeth into any flesh available to it, and to spread their monstrous disease.
Biological Zombies: Unexpected Side Effects
Biologicals are still alive; their ability to control their bodies are approximately the same as an underdeveloped child, depending. Given the progression of the virus, zombies can be classified on a long and convoluted scale of development.
The most unexpected side effect has to do with sex. Until they become drones, biological zombies still experience the vestiges of sexual attraction. Heterosexual male zombies are attracted to female targets, as heterosexual female zombies are attracted to male targets. Limited experiments with late homosexuals has yielded similar (reversed) results. This does not turn into something from a bad porno; zombies at this stage are far too degraded mentally to remember what sexual attraction means. Instead they behave more like children on the verge of puberty, fascinated by the opposite sex (or same sex), but endlessly confused about why. The only difference is that when they gang up on you, instead of pulling your hair, they'll rip out your throat.
Another unexpected side effect has to do with muscle memory and mechanical aptitude. Even with the higher thought functions degraded, zombies still retain some basic memory of how to do what they did in their life. When bereft of any hope of prey, early-stage zombies will return to jobs, will begin to do their household chores, and can often be found returning to their homes to wait for something to happen. Some zombies actually remember the basic way that the world works at the time of their zombie-fication, but that stage rarely lasts. More then one zombie infection has been wiped out when the newly minted zombies all piled into a truck to try and drive to the next town.
Also, even late-stage zombies appear to remember what rhythm is. They dance like stickfigure marionettes being controlled by a drunk hippo, but they do react interestingly to regular beats. It's not enough to distract them from chowing down on the nearest human, but it has led to a lot of speculation about the origin of music.
Biological Zombies: Weaknesses and Counters
The biggest advantage of biologicals is that they're alive. They manage all that circulatory and breathing business just fine, they know how to move, they're fast, and actually reasonably clever (as far as monkeys go). The biggest disadvantage is that they're alive, and they're very, very stupid.
Because they depend on the circulatory system, biologicals can bleed to death. Although legend has it that you can only kill them by destroying the head, major damage to a vein or artery will result in bleeding out in the same amount of time that it takes humans. Biologicals often tax their body in order to achieve high levels of physical performance, at the same time shutting down their body's natural responses (such as pain, which is disturbing to most zombies). Although this helps in the short run infect-as-many-people-as-you-can sprint, it's detrimental in the long term. It turns out that all that immune system stuff actually does something. With it disabled, and with the normal responses like fever and exhaustion turned to off, the body suffers a lot more problems then you would imagine.
Injured zombies lack any knowledge of disinfectant and hygiene, leading to infections of gangrene on still-attached limbs. Since zombies are normally infected with a bite wound in the first place, they start with a significant handicap in the 'surviving disease' category. Zombies exposed to wilderness conditions suffer from heatstroke, fever, and pneumonia as do normal humans; however, they don't suffer any of the symptoms. They simply keep walking until they fall over, the fact that they keep pushing themselves contributing to their collapse. Over the years more zombies have died of pneumonia then all counter-measures combined. More zombies have been disabled by tripping and breaking their legs then all the chainsaw-inflicted mayhem we could imagine.
Biological zombies can do only the things that humans can do. In fact they can't do everything that a human can do, lacking memories of what that actually is. Attempts by zombies to carry out flying leaps between one building and another usually end in zombie pancakes. A zombie can no more pry a door off of its hinges then you can, although they might be able to use crude tools. Biologicals can walk along the bottom of a lake, for about two minutes. Some of them can swim in the early stages. By the later stages, it just gets stupid.
The second largest weakness of biologicals is the transmission vector; zombies spread to other zombies via exchange of fluid (airborne zombie-fication keeps burning out too fast). Unless you have a thing for kissing zombies (or in the case of more difficult viruses, necrophilia), the only way in which the disease gets transferred is through biting or scratching. In order to induce this, most viruses are engineered to create the proper mix of hormones that leads to the hunger for fresh flesh.
The problem here should be manifest. If a zombie is found by a group of uninfected humans, it stands a good chance of inflicting several wounds, even on humans it does not immediately feast on, in the surprise attack. However, as the infection spreads, the numbers of zombies rise and the number of humans in the immediate area drops. Humans caught by zombies are much more likely to be simply devoured. If each human puts up a fight and disables one zombie, the net effect is that each human caught will disable one zombie and then be completely devoured, shrinking the horde. Biological zombie infestations tend to peak, because their ability to spread geographically is extremely limited, and the moment that the population of zombies becomes similar in size to the population of prey, the whole thing falls apart.
Necromantic Zombies: The Idiot's Guide to Ravening Hordes
The other way to get around the physics problem is just to subvert it completely and power the whole body by magic. Sufficiently complicated magic can completely re-animate a human body after death; after all, the cells can be revived (calling the soul back, however, is a much trickier procedure). However, most people who make zombies are content just to infuse the body with magic and make it do what you want.
The benefits of using an external energy source are legion. For one thing, the strength and power of a zombie is then equivalent to how much energy you pour into them. This allows zombies to perform super-human feats, leap tall buildings, rip apart brick walls, even play Flight of the Bumblebee one-handed. For another thing you dispense with all the weaknesses of those pesky biologicals; they can't be killed, they can reanimate as long as there's something to animate, they don't require muscle fiber, brains, or really anything else. They change from simple, infected humans into monsters of absolute destruction.
Necromantic zombies obey their master's commands absolutely. When turned loose, they obey their last order, destroying towns, ravaging countrysides, and laying waste to anyone who has dared incur their master's wrath. Unstoppable, they descend on a countryside like the plague, and your only hope is either to flee before them, or to hide where they don't even notice you. Otherwise defenses, barricades, and weapons will only slow the inevitable.
Necromantic Zombies: Why This is a Stupid Idea
Of course, necromantic zombies have hardly conquered the world. This is because using necromancy to animate a zombie in a plot for world domination (or if you're a nihlist, world annihilation), is the stupidest idea since the hybrid Hummer. In fact, even proposing the use of necromantic zombies for anything other then artistic license is sufficient information to get you expelled from the League of Evil Sorcerers, and is considered to be failing the intelligence test.
The first, last, and largest problem is that when a necromancer raises zombies, they empower the zombies at the same time. That means that the numbers and strengths of the zombies risen is entirely dependent on the necromancer. Every iota of energy a zombie expends, battering down barricades, absorbing shotgun blasts, and doing the tango, costs the necromancer who is acting as their permanent generator. The more zombies you have, the weaker they get, and the stupider they get, because the necromancer has less and less time and ability to devote to controlling each one. Even if he keeps the power conduits open, you have to pay attention. A zombie ordered to chase down a person will batter itself to pieces on a concrete wall if the target manages to get into a bunker, if you're not paying attention.
A C-ranked necromancer can raise up to five or so zombies at the superhuman strength level, a B-ranked necromancer can do many, many more. An A-ranked necromancer can raise an army. A small army, but an army nonetheless. Each corpse takes a lot of killing, but there are only a limited number of them, and if you do deal enough damage, they physically disintegrate. This forces the necromancer to replace them, which is usually a lot harder then it looks. And takes energy. Think of a necromancer like a bank account; every day that he operates at army-level he's probably burning about a year's worth of savings.
This has been the downfall of necromantic zombie hordes. Any serious attempt to raise an army that you power requires you to keep powering it. This attempt just doesn't scale. Even keeping your horde moderately active requires a huge investment in energy, that could be better invested in other things, like running away from the inevitable counterattack.
Necromantic zombies can be killed directly, but they take a lot of killing. High gauge firearms are highly recommended, especially the REDACTED or the REDACTED. Some manuals recommend direct fire from a REDACTED, but I don't, since hitting your target too close to the barrel can result in a release of REDACTED radiation sufficient to sterilize an area approximately the size of REDACTED. Conventional firearms are not much use, although anything that can be used to kill tanks can kill most zombies. Swords and other cutting implements are actually rather good here. A zombie with no arms is not immobilized, but he's unlikely to be able to grab you.
Nightmare Scenario: The Hybrid Horde
The conventional solution to the zombie problem (namely that zombies aren't a problem) is the Hybrid Horde. The Hybrid Horde depends on a core of necromantic zombies imbued with high damage resistance and endurance, each of whom carries a zombie virus. The necromantic zombies, using superhuman strength and speed, launch attacks that end up infecting anyone they strike, allowing them to become mobile vectors for the disease. This creates a horde of biological living zombies arranged around, and pheromonally enthralled by, a group of “zombie lords”. It allows you to utilize your indestructible juggernauts to spread plague through enemy ranks, except that the plague turns them into killers in their own right. You don't wait for the plague, you are the plague.
The Hybrid Horde requires the perpetrators to have sufficient knowledge of both necromancy and genetic engineering to create both ends of the delivery mechanism, so one is extremely rare. They also require a great deal of control and subtlety to control, because a Hybrid Horde is a B or A level threat, and is responded to accordingly.
Countering the Horde: Threat Level B
The general rule is that a B-level threat is capable of exterminating a good sized town. A necromancer with a horde of zombies can level a mid-sized town assuming that it's isolated from the outside. A plague that causes biological zombies can destroy one in about a week, and can spread beyond the city limits within hours.
Either the necromantic or biological zombie usually requires a sorcerer of B-rank to create and manage, fine tuning the horde or the genetics of the disease (sometimes on the fly) is usually impossible to a lower-ranked sorcerer by definition. However, it should come as no surprise that a B-ranked magician can be countered by another B-ranked magician.
Zombies are generally seen as an ineffective, poor man's tool, like frightening natives with firecrackers, effective against people unprepared for them, but relatively ineffective against more determined opponents. Necromantic zombies are simply human bodies infused with magic to allow movement, there is no real difference between using magic to animate a dozen human corpses, or using magic to animate a dozen killer robots with Austrian accents. And the zombie bite is ineffective against steel hulls. The human body is actually pretty flimsy; if you want only brute strength and brute power, you would be wise to create a creature that isn't based on a decaying human. If you have to pick a vessel for the power of a thousand screaming dead souls, a single human corpse usually isn't the one you would pick.
Necromantic zombies are vulnerable to any sort of jamming that cuts them off from their creator. Smart necromancers create subroutines that allow them to function when cut off from home base, but that subroutine is, of necessity, limited (for most people, those for whom it isn't limited are beyond the subject of this document). They are not vulnerable too, but certainly not resistive too, destructive magics, including fireballs, concussive force, summoned creatures, enchanted weapons, and, well, basically anything that works on humans. They also lack a human's native abilities, their versatility and creativity.
Biological zombies, although harder to track because they don't show up on sense as magical puppets, are even more vulnerable. Biological zombies are incapable of generating the necessary force to pierce physical shields, or defensive auras. They are vulnerable to poisons, to blades, to invisible assassins, to summoned hunter-killers, basically to anything that humans are vulnerable to. The response to B-level threats includes a great many of people employed by Tactical who are used to orders like “go to location X and kill everyone there”. If everyone there is a zombie, that only makes things easier.
A debate has arisen about proper doctrine to use when dealing with a hybrid horde. Normally horde containment has been the first priority, but in certain cases people have hypothesized that it's easier to cut off the head, eliminate the driving necromancer, and then deal with the horde afterwards. Upon deployment of a response team, the decision on how to proceed is left to the discretion of the team leader, pending approval by the Operations Board.
Eliminating the Horde: A-level Threats
There are very few A-level necromancers. All of those who made it to that level don't bother messing around with zombies, they craft their own eldritch horrors out of the shadows of life. But a coven of B-level necromancers could theoretically make an A-level regional threat.
Consider a comprehensive Hybrid Horde attack on a place like California. Two dozen necromancers, each maneuvering their own group of necromantic zombies, would launch simultaneous attacks on crowded venues all over the state, each necromancer concentrating on a separate community. Each necromancer would be supported by a sorcerer of some other type, to mask their operation, jam communications, and reduce the kind of panic that makes things disorganized. Necromantic zombies would appear in music venues, sports events, and crowded shopping districts as raving lunatics, jumping at, biting, and scratching as many people as possible. Some of those people would be transported to hospitals, but most would probably brush it off as some damned fool crazy stunt. The police would be dispatched after what would probably be reported as the weirdest cult crime in California, although they would have little luck.
Within two hours, symptoms would begin to appear among the effected, fevers would begin that would, within an hour, produce the first force of biological zombies. The symptoms appear minor, most of the victims go have a lie down, or go seal themselves in a bathroom (it can make you feel nauseated), or try to take a nap. Within half an hour they are incapacitated. Just as people start to worry, they come alive again, and start to attack.
At the moment the first reports come in, the second attack starts. The zombies still leading the police on turn around and attack their pursuers, eliminating and infecting the first responders. Additional necromantic zombies crash into control centers, dispatch offices, and communication buildings, cutting most cities off from direct communication. California experiences a general crash of internet, telephone, and electrical services as the grid is overwhelmed. As this is happening hospitals, with the largest concentration of victims, become deathtraps as biological zombies flood their halls.
By the time most people become aware that this is more then a blackout, the major response units have been eliminated, central communication is gone, all medical help is mostly in control of the undead, and the horde is spreading from hundreds of points simultaneously. If supporting sorcerers can seal off roadways in and out, the high urban and suburban density in California will lead to the population approaching termination within hours.
This is the power of a group of B-level magicians working together. A group of only a hundred B-rank magicians can possibly depopulate the state of California in one single stroke, leaving only a fraction of millions of people left alive.
An organization like North American Combat Command's First Heavy Assault Brigade has almost two thousand B-ranks. NACC's ready combat brigade automatically releases their expeditionary battalion (whichever one is on rota) for deployment the moment an A-level emergency is declared. If the situation accelerated to Red-Two (which the destruction of California would authorize), the entire Brigade is automatically deployed in lieu of an Operation veto. One-HAB carries enough firepower to level essentially any attempt at launching a hybrid horde attack, short of the intervention of extraplanar entities. Sufficiently talented magicians can formulate antiviral agents on the fly, cut off all communications between necromantic zombies, and deploy entire armies of things that are very, very good at killing zombies.
Zombies are sometimes the magical equivalent of mounted police; very effective at crowd control of mostly-unarmed crowds. If you're going to go up against an enemy army though, they're mostly useless, and we have a lot of firepower sitting around with nothing to do other then find other people and hurt them. Even without our intervention, of course, sooner or later someone would just nuke the epicenter and lance the wound. Which is why, though there are continual demonic invasions, and constant skirmishing against evil cabals of magicians who spend most of their time playing politics, nobody really worries about zombie invasions.
What You Should Do
None of which really affects you. You have no say in how fast or how slow (or if at all) a coordinated response appears to the zombie menace. They're at your door.
Your answer is to get out of your house. Zombies of both types are profoundly distance limited. Because zombie infestations are limited, the greatest danger they pose is if you are within easy grabbing distance of their epicenter. The first instinct of many people is to fort up, find somewhere fairly safe where they can meet up with their friends and neighbors and await help. Their second instinct is often to go around in the area and raid stores for weapons, chainsaws, and food supplies. All of these concerns should be secondary to getting out.
Zombies are only dangerous if they can find you. They can only find you if they are where you are. Because both types of zombie infections spread so slowly, putting a geographical barrier between you and them is paramount. Yes, it's nice to stop by the local gun store and pick up a lot of firearms, but the truth is, you don't need them nearly as much as you need to be about a hundred miles away. If you can shoot a zombie, he's way the hell too close to you.
Second, don't fall out of touch. Take your cell phone, some cell towers may be up. Take a radio, battery powered if possible. The one in your car should work fine. Stay in touch. Avoiding zombies is easiest if you know where they are, and it's easiest to know where they are if you can at least listen to broadcasts from friendly groups. If you can, coordinate, but do not group. As tempting as it seems to gather yourself and your allies and engage zombies directly in some sort of full-scale war, this is foolhardy. Don't provide tempting targets.
And third, even when away, stay mobile. Be prepared to vacate at the first sign of something you can't handle; have escape routes mapped out. Discretion is the better part of valor. Be prepared to leave, be prepared to react in a state of emergency. That's how you stay alive.
Every once in a while, you can't leave. You're stuck in town. Maybe you can find no transportation, maybe the zombie epicenters are around you and you don't know where they are. In this case you're stuck, you have to confront the zombies. The three principles still matter; move towards regions with minimal zombie concentrations first thing, stay in touch with other groups, but don't form up with them to provide a more tempting target. And be ready to run the moment you hear people clawing at the door.
Surviving a Virus Outbreak
Biological zombies are basically humans with greater endurance. Given the state of the average suburbanite, a group of zombies has a maximum travel time of about forty miles a day. They have about a week's endurance at this rate before the stress begins to severely degrade their performance. Therefore, the best place to be is at least three hundred miles from the epicenter. This is equivalent to a full tank of gas in many vehicles, assuming filling stations are down. If you can, carpool, and combine the gas in your vehicles, or store excess gas in containers.
Safety in this case is dependent on the weather. You're far more likely to survive a zombie infestation in winter or the heat of summer then in the temperate late spring and early fall. Keep this in mind when you've made your first hundred miles. As counter-intuitive as it may seem to many people with wilderness experience, the harsher the weather is, the more dangerous the terrain, the safer you will be. If you are traveling with someone who has significant outdoor experience, use that to the best of your advantage.
Biological zombies also tend to fall victim to human fallacies, even more so since they're profoundly limited. When presented with two trails, one going uphill and one going downhill, they tend to pick the downhill one. They avoid the hard way and go the easy way. The more remote the location you end up at, the more likely it is that the zombies will just wander the other way. Remember that in the wilderness you have the advantage, even the most pampered, out-of-shape, and inexperienced suburbanite is much more likely to survive in the wilderness then a biological zombie. You at least have the sense to cover up.
Weapons are nice, and if presented with the opportunity you should go and gather them, but your primary defense is mobility. If you're shooting at zombies, you've done something wrong. People are better then weapons; ideally you want enough people in your group that you can have two of three people awake at all times without courting exhaustion. Early warning is better for long term survival then firepower.
Despite my warnings, thinning out the herd can be beneficial. Lone zombies are easily dispatched, but the bodies must be disposed of. The pheromone that makes zombies unappetizing to other zombies often fades with death, and the body can then attract hungrier, desperate zombies looking for flesh that's at least warm. Nevertheless, a lone zombie is still a threat, and if you believe that you can eliminate it, then do so at your leisure. Just beware; it could have been the outskirts of a major horde.
There is one massive exception to this for North American readers. Do NOT under any circumstances attempt to try this in either southern Alaska, or on the northern coast of Canada. No matter how experienced a woodsman you are, no matter how good you think you are at surviving in the woods, you are simply not good enough. Biological human zombies have weaknesses because humans are largely a subtropical species without the biological adaptations to survive in the environments they now live in. Infected kodiak and polar bears do not suffer from the same constraints. An insane, flesh eating, adrenaline suffused kodiak bear is faster then you are, often even in an automobile, and is resistant to many firearms. Zombie-infected kodiak bears are beyond anyone who does not have their second grade qualification in either firearms or melee weapons. If you do find yourself in those regions, you better get to sea, and fast.
(A note, most American wilderness, and European wilderness is safe. For reasons currently unexplained by science, this effect is extremely limited. Only ten percent or less of all zombie viral progenitors are capable of making the species jump from humans to non-humans, even to primates. However, the effects on most animals are non-threatening. Herbivores appear to get very confused by infestation, although you may expect territorial and mating displays out of season. Pure carnivores appear to succumb to different instincts, it seems to actually reduce their normal urge to feed, and the average carnivore losses a great deal of weight. Only omnivores have aggressive reactions, and even there the per-species response seems mixed. Black bears, for instance, begin to increasingly succumb to the 'flight' instinct in fight-or-flight).
Surviving a Necromantic Horde
Often necromancers have a limited range of control. And given that creating a horde of necromantic zombies and turning them loose on the population is tantamount to waving a giant “Please Kick My Ass!” sign in the direction of the nearest Bureau office, often necromancers don't want their zombies to get too far from home. This makes getting away just as imperative. If you can double the distance from the epicenter, they have four times as much area to search to find you.
Unfortunately, finding a remote location away from a necromantic horde is much more difficult then dealing with a biological horde. While a biological horde shuffles sort of aimlessly around looking for dinner, a necromantic horde is controlled by a person who can read maps. If you find yourself in a position where you can't just keep walking, such as being trapped on a small island, you have to engage in a game of cat and mouse. You're trying to figure out where he isn't going to look, he's trying to figure out where you think he's not going to look.
There is only one key here, stay away from other people. Presumably, a necromancer who is actively sending zombies out into populated regions has “killing people” on his to-do list. In that case, when presented with many possible targets, he is likely to pick the one that yields the most reward, and the highest head count. If you are caught in large groups, be prepared to scatter at the first sign of a necromantic zombie, even as fast as it is it can only pursue one person at a time.
Do not attempt to engage necromantic zombies. It is impossible to tell the power level of a necromantic zombie, even using previous experience. Imagine a necromancer with a horde of a hundred zombies under her control. Her power is split equally between all hundred zombies. Now imagine that you and your ambitious friends manage to ambush one of them, running it over with a car and then finishing it off with repeated shotgun blasts that blow the flesh apart. You might try to ambush another one. Meanwhile, now the necromancer knows where you are. She can drain the power temporarily out of ten of her zombies, rendering them almost inert, and put it all into a zombie sent stumbling into your area. This time, when you repeat the ambush, the zombie catches the car, rips it into two pieces, and proceeds to messily devour your brains.
If you absolutely must stay in the region with necromantic zombies, find someplace to hide. What you're trying to accomplish is to erase all obvious signs of your presence, so that they overlook you. This includes, sight, scent, and sound. Additionally, places where it is difficult to get at you are preferred, some necromancers don't want to use the energy. Unfortunately, most of the places that are good for this tend to be hard to get out of, for instance locked inside walk-in freezers, or sealed inside bank vaults.
If for some reason you must fight, or if you have managed somehow to arouse the necromancer's personal ire (don't sue them, it only makes them angry), you're going to need something heavy. Weapons are nice, but most weapons that aren't at least built for taking down armored vehicles are going to require too many shots to break through the defensive auras surrounding necromantic zombies. Generally you're looking for industrial equipment, everything from electrocution through your own diesel generator to the kind of welding and smelting equipment normally only found at steel processing plants. Whatever you use needs to be heavy, hot, or otherwise so dangerous that you can normally locate it by the number of warning signs on the door. Of course, the problem is that all these traps are hard to set up, hard to use, and difficult to adapt if the zombie in question decides to tunnel through the walls instead of coming in the door. But with enough expendable people to throw at the zombie in question, and enough explosives with people who know how to use it, you can usually hold out for at least some time.
Escaping Armageddon: The Hybrid Case
One of the reasons that escaping from a biological horde is recommended over fighting it directly is the complete inability of most people to be able to tell the difference between a biological and a hybrid horde. When using the standard approach, a hybrid horde uses its biological zombies as feelers, letting them roam freely in the hopes of finding and infecting (or devouring) lone humans, hopefully inducing humans to band together to resist them. Once the constant pressure of wandering biologicals has forced humans to band together and begin fighting back, necromantic zombies are sent in to deal with the resistance. All the human escapees see is a few scattered zombies in the street, right up until the point where hulking necromantics are ripping holes through the concrete wall.
The only real defense against a hybrid horde is to escape it. One advantage here is that a hybrid horde is generally deployed against a much larger area; often they need their biologicals to serve as their eyes and ears. Since the biologicals don't have very good eyes or ears, they can be avoided. Because they are accident prone, and not directly connected to the necromancer, one or two of them can be eliminated without anyone noticing, presuming that it's done quietly. If trapped in a limited geographic area that precludes escape, constant movement between reconnoitered safe houses is essential. Even so, even with detailed knowledge, you should still expect a 1-2% attrition rate due to random encounters. If you make a noise or cause a scene, scatter immediately.
If you have no hope of rescue, you have to improve your own odds. The only suggestible tactic for dealing with a hybrid horde is constant guerilla skirmishing to strip away the biological eyes and ears, traps set in the street, snipers who escape the moment the shot is fired, remote-detonated explosives. Coordinated forces can take advantage of distraction feints to lure away necromantic response forces while they kill more biologicals, but necromancers can learn too, and they think their biologicals are expendable.
The point of this is to wear thin the biological screen which the necromancer(s) are using to hold the region, forcing them to carry out constant reconnaissance with their core necromantic elements. This can make things difficult, since necromantic zombies are more dangerous, but it distributes them over a wider area, which is the only way to thin their numbers, since it is probably easier for the necromancer to replace one then it is for you to kill one. The entire point of this is to thin out the horde enough for a critical do-or-die strike at the horde's only weak point, the necromancers themselves. Given the vast number of explosive, poisonous, and otherwise deadly elements in the modern urban environment, it is entirely possible that you can kill the necromancer.
A brief calculation. A necromantic zombie at the upper end in quality can move at about 30 meters per second (60 mph). In dense terrain, there could be a necromantic zombie almost a kilometer from your position. Imagine you take a potshot at a zombie. Even in a city, this is audible, because it's quiet. Nobody's driving cars, nobody's flying planes, nobody's playing music. It can be heard. The speed of sound is about 340 m/sec, so it travels that kilometer in about 3 seconds. It then takes more then that (33 seconds) for the zombie to catch up to you. So, you have 36 seconds from the point at which you pull the trigger until the point where you have zombie in your face. That's 36 seconds to get sufficiently far from where you were to hide. Try that. Give yourself 36 seconds to find some place near where you are where somebody who can rip walls apart can't find you. Pretend your life depends on it.
Note that you only get one chance. Generally speaking, the number of forces required to provide this kind of striking power will use up all available living beings still in the region. If you fail, it's pretty much lights out. So make sure you have things planned out before you do it. Don't just rush in, although winging it has been known to work.
Conclusion
Most zombie guides describe how to make a self-sufficient fort and defend it. Don't do that. The length of a zombie infestation (or your ability to survive it) has been much exaggerated. In fact, for most people I don't even recommend stopping to get weapons, the temptation to try and use them may be just too much. Your primary defense is getting clear, getting away, and staying there. Delusions of cutting zombies to pieces with chainsaws, setting them ablaze with napalm torches, and blowing them apart with shotguns should be left to Hollywood.
Besides, zombies stink, and you really don't want to get any of that on you.
Addendum A: Proper Responses for Trained Personnel
If you've qualified for your B-rating, then you are, of course, supposed to disregard all previous advice. Many people are confused about what to do, a confusion that is understandable given the relative rarity of zombie invasions. Being thrown into something new is always disconcerting, especially when it's trying to kill you.
Your primary objective when facing a zombie intrusion is to even the odds while avoiding being dragged down. Anyone capable of wielding a baseball bat can take down a biological zombie if lucky, but necromantic zombies pose more of a threat. You cannot determine the magnitude of a necromancer's threat to yourself or those around you, but you can whittle down their forces of necromantic zombies on which they depend. Combat is similar to combat against any humanoid construct, with the added advantage that they shred much more easily.
Zombies are immune to most projected illusions, wards keyed against intelligent beings, and due to the advanced state of decay, most viral or bacterial weapons. Structurally they suffer the same disadvantages of the human body while retaining the peculiar pumping failure of the construct, being vulnerable to disintegration while performing high-speed maneuvers. Because of their tendency to be partially rotting they are vulnerable to concussion damage, including that from explosive and sonic techniques. However, sensory deprivation does not necessarily disable the zombie in question.
Also, beware of traps. Just because they're raising zombies instead of golems doesn't mean that they can't do golems either. I'm just sayin'
Keep your head clear and on your shoulders, engage under fire, and wait for help. Don't do something stupid. If you survive it, you'll have to deal with me, and I don't think you want to do that.