Friday, December 9, 2011

Jailhouse Rocked

When it comes to scaring off zombies, fire usually works really well. When those same zombies have set up a relatively clever defensive position inside a building, something with a little more subtlety is called for.

God, did I pick the wrong team for subtle.

You'll be happy to know that I'm no longer trapped in a cell with hungry new breed zombies waiting for me to make a mistake. Will, Rachel, Steve, and Becky tried a frontal assault yesterday, but I shouted at them before they could breach the front doors. They might have cleared the token force of undead left outside to guard, but the majority were in with me. Waiting. About half of them hiding in clever little spots, waiting to drop down on one of my friends, or to snag an ankle from under a desk.

Becky's idea of subtlety was yelling for me to flip the bunk if possible and cover myself in the mattress to block debris from the explosion.

Yes. The explosion.

She's scary at times. Becky had a bit of her homemade  dynamite left. We used all the big sticks, but she made some smaller ones for occasions when a whole lot of boom wasn't needed. Three massive waves of compressed air slamming me against the wall later, and the zombies were in a panic. Those that hadn't been incapacitated or outright killed by the blasts (more numerous than you'd think. The explosions weren't that large) were scared out of their minds by the light and noise. They lost all cohesion as a unit, running to escape careless of the dangers.

My people were ready for them. It was a slaughter.

We've learned something very important about the new breed with this incident. Old school zombies, excepting smarties, were mindless and unafraid of most things. Fire scared them, and ammonia drove them off. Their sense of smell is a key element to how they operate, I think that's obvious now. But loud noise and brief flashes of light were not the sort of things that ran them off, much less drove them crazy.

And it wasn't a brief sort of madness the new breed was showing. A human being, when hit with a flash/bang grenade, will have his senses of sight and hearing overwhelmed for a short while. People, living people, have the intellectual capacity to override the panic and confusion that such a device creates. New breed zombies clearly don't.

That's HUGE. If sound can affect them so strongly, if overwhelming their senses can drive them to mindless fear, then we've got weapons to use against them. I have to assume that ammonia will still work on them since they use their noses like all zombies. I wish I could take the time to test some of the ideas I have. Damn the zombie apocalypse for making me feel like a mad scientist!

I suppose I should mention that we made it to the Google campus safely. We'll be here the day, then off again tomorrow. I'm going to take tomorrow's post to tell you about a project the engineers here want to attempt on a small scale to see if it's viable. It's neat. I'm eager to tell you!

But not today.

No comments:

Post a Comment