Surviving

Now, for everyone’s favorite part: the survival guides. Yes, bring on the machine guns and semi-trunks and bunkers and chainsaws and everything else, it’ll be a good ol’ grinder!

No, not at all actually. This is the biggest difference between the classical apocalypse and the pandemic: surviving versus isolation. In the classical apocalypse you would need to fight a lot of zombies and do your best to stay alive. In the pandemic, you need to focus on staying away from infected folk and isolating yourself from the outside air. To help plan, I contacted self-defense strategist and zombie theorist Terrill Sebastian to come up with a proper plan.

To recap, fungus zombies will release deadly spores into the air and infect by interaction, while having full control of their motor functions. To start, it is safe to say that you can not, must not go outside. You will die immediately. The spores will enter through your respiratory system, travel to your brain via nerve connections through your mouth/nose, take root there, force you to climb up high, and kill you where your carcass will lie dead for a few weeks until it bursts out more spores.

Terrill Sebastian began with these: To stay away is to stay alive, and that being said it is useful we have time to prepare (because we will see it coming, and will have time to prepare ourselves). We will need self-contained suits, very similar, if not identical to, HAZMAT suits. There would have to be proper ways to eat, breathe, filter air, urinate, and defecate within these suits, and they would not be cheap. However, it would be totally necessary to stay away from the outside air. An astronaut’s suit is essentially what you would need.

http://www.wolfhazmat.de/interspiro/Trekkchem_Light.jpg

A weapon would be necessary to fend off interaction-based zombies. A simple bullet or two should get rid of them, even from a handgun (I prefer revolvers). The spores are the biggest threat.

Obviously, you can not survive a vagabond. For housing, he suggested a house with compartments. A lock and lack of windows should keep interaction zombies out, and the compartments are for surviving the spores. In order to enter the house you would need several separate rooms A disinfectant spray would be applied to your suit in one room to remove a good amount of spores. Then you would enter the second room, where you would remove everything and wash, wash, wash everything thoroughly, doing your best to hold your breath as much as possible. It’s not deadly to breathe, but why risk it? One spore, and you’re dead. Just one.

After hanging up clothing, you could then enter the house. It does seem a bit nonsensical to leave the house, but you would need food (it would have to be canned or bagged; you could not hunt because the spores would be covering everything). Foraging would be a necessity, and a difficult one at that. If it did reach apocalypse levels, these zombies would simply starve us to death by contaminating all of our food.
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Sebastian, Terrill J., Sr. "Pandemic Defense." Personal interview. 12 Apr. 2013.