How Not to be Seen

We are ready to move around outside now! Pretty exciting, isn't it? So are you walking or driving? Gonna try driving, eh? well here's something to think about first.
You will be seen! Seen and heard, really; the hearing may be more important, as loud as your car probably is. At this point, you're probably happier about that electric car you bought than ever, right? Silent and life-preserving, or nearly so. Wait, you didn't buy an electric car. Well that's probably fine, it'll be hard to recharge it once the battery runs out anyway. Gas, on the other hand, will be easier to find, but like I said you run a greater risk of attracting attention.
Things that seem "close" by car are a hell of a long way away when you're walking. If it takes you ten or fifteen minutes to drive somewhere, it's probably a good idea to plan on taking the whole day to get there on foot. I suppose you're going to try proving me wrong, right? You're gonna try walking to your intended first-base location today, just to prove you know the route and how long it'll take you. Well, remember that you won't want to walk on the roads if you can help it; too open, too easy to be seen. You'll also be avoiding zombies and carrying everything you intend to possess, so don't think you'll move as fast then as you might today.
If you're driving, this rule is the king: Know Your Route! If you're going somewhere you're already familiar with, you need to know multiple ways to get there from where you are. The main intersections and major roads could easily be jammed up, so you'll want to know a back way. Those other roads will be less busy, but they're narrower and easier to jam up.
You will not keep your car very long, so don't get attached! The further you need to go from home, the more likely that you'll eventually encounter some kind of traffic jam or quarantine roadblock (ha!) that you just won't find a way around. There's good news for these situations though: somewhere up ahead there's a car that you can maneuver out of the situation onto relatively clear roads, it probably has the keys in it, and there's not likely to be any corpses to remove from it - unless they stayed in the car long enough to die from hunger, any corpses would have found their way out, one way or another. What you really want is a car that was abandoned in haste, so look for open doors in that situation.
Hot-wiring the car is a useful skill if you have it, but for legal reasons I can't help you figure it out. If you know the general idea, find some diagrams of the wiring for a car's ignition switch to study. I suppose it'll be different between different makes and models, but the more you know...


now, about remaining unseen... watch this useful and informative video:





Again, this doesn't relate directly to zombie survival, but there are valuable lessons to learn. As you can see, it's very good to not be seen.

• Rule #1: Don't stand up. 
• This is a good one to remember. Unless you have very good cover around you, it's best to move in a bit of a crouching position, to lessen your exposure and to disguise your profile. Zombies, we theorize, will only be interested in humans. The less human you manage to look, the safer you'll be.
• Rule #2: See no evil
• It's not automatically true that if you can't see a zombie they can't see you. It's more likely to be the zombie you don't see that's going to get you anyway. It is at least true that if you can see a zombie, they're perfectly able to see you too, provided that they have eyes. Line of sight works both ways, and one will always be against you. You still want to know where they are, but if the zombie isn't aware of you, don't go looking for it unless you really want to find it! Once they are aware of you there's not much to do but run, or hide, or you know the rest.
• Rule #4: Speak no evil
• There's a lot we don't know about zombies. They might or might not use smell to find you, but most of them will probably have at least part of their ears, so don't make any kind of noise you don't have to - ever! Sound doesn't care about line of sight or anything, and even if the zombie can't find you by the echoes of your voice the very sound of live humanity might get it excited enough to make an energetic search, which is certainly bad for you.
• Rule #3: Hear everything, especially the evil
• You know to be quiet, but zombies don't. Of course, they have less to worry about from you than you do from them. All you can do to them is re-kill them, and they probably don't really care about that. Be as quiet as you can and you'll be better able to hear other things that are out and about making noise. If it's not a zombie, it's potential food - or potentially human, also, I suppose. Don't get those mixed up if you can help it. Talking to a can of spam is a sign of insanity.
• Rule #4: Don't pretend to be a zombie.
• This worked in Shaun of the Dead, so it's obviously going to work in real life - just like how you can kill a zombie with vinyl records, as if they were huge floppy ninja stars. No, don't you believe it. There's no telling what cues they'll be using to pick us out from the scenery (without dangerous and incredibly stupid scientific experimentation), so you won't have any kind of disguise you can risk your life on. Plus, someone human might kill you by mistake, and that's always a bad time. 

That last bit doesn't really help you not be seen - I mean mostly to keep you from waving a flag and drawing attention to yourself there. Not that I can stop you from trying, and if you feel compelled to try go ahead, I'll nominate you for the Darwin awards. I intend to have real Darwin awards once people start coming to my compound. We'll have an anonymous nomination system where we can share stories about how our erstwhile compatriots performed the noble sacrifice of removing their genes from the gene pool. You'll be nominated, provided you don't get everyone with you killed. Sure, it'll be kind of bittersweet, and laughing at the dead isn't very nice... it's not high on my priority list, but I did have little plaques made that can be engraved with the names of our most spectacularly dead acquaintances. The idea is that if you get nominated, you probably helped someone else survive, so that's worthy of an award, right? Not that you'll be alive to see it. Well, anyway, let's move on.

Staying hidden on the move is going to be tough. I highly recommend moving at night, since that will leave less of you to be seen. Wear dark clothing if you can, keep anything shiny from reflecting any light, stay in the shadows. Zombies don't need to sleep, so they'll be up and about as much as ever, but the darkness gives you some slight advantage. Remember, you don't really want to see them since they'd be able to see you, so having daylight doesn't provide a lot of benefit - unless, of course, you're driving.

Walk at night, drive in the day. If you're going to drive, do it in broad daylight. There's lots of good reasons for this. First, and most important, is the matter of head lights. If you turn on your headlights at night, you're pretty much pointing an arrow at yourself. To drive at night, then, you'd need to do without them, which is pretty hard to do if there's no other light to see by; even with a full moon and some street lights, debris and other cars will take longer to maneuver around in the dark. Zombies will hear your engine as well at night as during the day, so there's no real advantage to night driving. During the day and you'll cover more ground and be as inconspicuous as you can be while sitting behind an internal combustion engine. Like I said above, the sound will echo around and alert any zombies nearby, but with a little luck you can be out of there before they find you, or at least moving fast enough to keep them behind you. You're still taking a real risk by driving, but we might take some time some other time to talk about how to properly fortify your vehicle to minimize that risk. Whatever the risks, the ground-covering, time-saving, and resource-hauling benefits are good for you, and quite possibly worth the risks at some point.


Now, suppose you're out there, sneaking around at night, trying to make it to your appointed rendezvous with your friend/family/lover. Let's say for simplicity's sake that you reached your intended destination without notable incident and you're about to go inside.
Close the door quietly behind you! I hope it's not an automatic door; if it is, I hope the power's already off. If the answer to both those questions is "no", find some duct tape and cover up the sensors that open the doors. If this leaves the doors in a permanently "open" position, find a way to cut their power and push the doors closed by hand. God, an alarm didn't just go off, did it? Shit, stupid people and their stupid security systems. Better get the hell away from there, the noise is going to bring zombies, not police.

Whew! that was close. Right? If you're still there, it wasn't quite close enough. Or are you still running? I can wait.




ok. Good. Catch your breath, but don't breathe too loud. Did you get away, or did you have to kill the one(s) chasing you? In any case it's probably safe to go back now. Safer by far if you killed the zombies that found you, but if you led them far enough away you can sneak your way back to the rendezvous location once that alarm turns itself off. Get in, shut the door behind you, and start clearing a perimeter where you can wait for your friend. Don't hold your breath.

When it's time to sleep, for God's sake hide as well as you can. You won't hear the zombies coming in your sleep, so do what you can to make sure they can't find you.

One last thought: if you managed to pick a location with some kind of pharmacy or healthcare department, see if you can find some of those Breathe Right nasal strips that stop you from snoring. I know you don't think you snore, nobody does. You probably do, though, especially after a day (or night) like you've probably had. Making a little hidey-hole to sleep in is pointless if you're sawing logs for all the world to hear.

Enjoy your well-earned rest. I hope you die in your sleep.