Let's face it, we all assume that we'd make it through the initial stages of a zombie scenario. After all, dying from disease or from a bite when everything else is still normal doesn't make for a very good story. But, it does beg the question, where does the massive hordes of shambling undead come from if no one is the first to go?
In reality, I'd likely be one of the first would go, and so would you. After all, caught completely flat footed there's really not much that can be done. You can't effectively fight off a zombie ambush if you don't even know that there are zombies. If, in that initial shock, the community you are in panics and disintegrates instead of repelling the hostile dead then you're probably going to die. That's just how things like this work, when there isn't a way around it.
Assuming the police and fellow citizens hold things together long there's the fact that I'm fat. Not ridiculously so, but enough to effectively slow me down. There's a good chance that I will be ambushed, and I'm not in such excellent enough shape to assume right off that I will escape. And that assuming that there's a place for me to go, if there isn't an organized plan for people in general then I'm likely to stay put which could be a death sentence should things beyond my control turn out the wrong way.
So, assuming that I don't catch whatever it is prior to the disaster proper and I don't die in the immediate aftermath then the real problems start. After all, I don't believe that zombies would be the biggest threat to my survival in the months after the disaster. I believe that other survivors would hold that particularly honor, mostly because I will have things that they need and those things that maintain trade and civil discourse will have largely evaporated. Humanity has a plan "C" for when they need stuff that they cannot trade for and that cannot be shared, it involves murder and theft. There is no doubt in my mind that I would be on the receiving end as opposed to the giving end of that sort of interaction.
So, assuming that I don't die of the zombiness prior to the first outbreak, don't get caught in a panic that results in painful death, and manage to avoid looters and other people willing to kill me to get the stuff they need to save their family and friends then I just have to worry about everything else that kills human being. It's not like we avoid death as it is, and virtually everything that kills people now will still kill people then. Aside from accidental bear attack and being hit by a car there's the normal raft of disease, the threat of contaminants improperly disposed of in the mayhem, and the problems of lack of maintenance for the stuff around us, after all when machines start falling apart people start getting really hurt.
Beyond all of that, I also lack the skills required to survive the disaster itself. I'm not an expert shot, and while I have gone camping periodically I'm not exactly "woodsy". This is a shame because I have exactly the right skills for building the new society that would emerge from the disaster, or at least I think I do. Really, I believe that how good we come out of the initial stages of that kind of disaster would depend how well people like myself can come through it. If we rescue each other and keep our connections to one another strong throughout then we don't have to lose everything, but this is just me waxing poetic about something that is unlikely to happen.
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