hold up
And a bone apple tea to you!
a 1950s school building. they were built like castles. have wide open lawns and high towers. windows were at least a story above grade, and the glass had that mesh embedded inside.
any windows or doors that are at grade can easily be barricaded or already are with high grade steel cages.
bonus if there’s an internal courtyard that can be used as a field for growing crops, water retention area, and just an outdoor exercise area.
schools already have a cafeteria and kitchen, showers, fitness and entertainment, first-aid and medical, an entire library, science/biological labs. many schools have also been retrofitted with solar panels as well.
a school is really the best place to hold up for any kind of natural disaster.
A shopping mall, so I can pick up a flashlight, duct tape some jewelry on it and use it as a lightsaber
Any location? An automated Oneill cylinder.
I got an old abandoned insane asylum on the top of a hill next to a naturally occurring spring kinda near me. You really couldn’t ask for a better location. Farm on the roof.
A bridge. Destroy the entrance on both sides, build a draw bridge in its place. This is assuming youre not worried about human enemies, which are always the real threat.
There was a movie/TV show where the character was hunkered down in a wind turbine. Always thought it was a clever idea.
Look, I need to spend my efforts on the toxicity and climate collapse apocalypse. I would WELCOME zombies at this point.
An island? Seems like a great way to isolate yourself from the masses
World War Z, the book, proved this wrong.
I don’t know, the old zombie flick ‘Shock Waves’ (1977)… Not typical zombies but it made the island approach seem a little less viable to me. It’s still better than my default choice of a mall.
“Secure” as in “fortify it against zombies and potentially other threats”
Or as in “I can get to it and lay some sort of claim to it”
Because if it’s the former, we probably need to put some restrictions on the scenario. That’s really the hard part of this and we’re just assuming we can do it, and your best bet is probably to secure as big of an area as possible. A city, a country, a whole hemisphere, or hell, the entire world or the solar system if we’re being really silly.
If we’re going with the latter, where we find a building or property of some kind and call “dibs” and the rest of it is up to us
I think a tech school is a pretty good bet, at least thinking of my local tech schools.
They have some fully stocked workshops with pretty much any tools and materials you could need- carpentry, plumbing, automotive, electrical, etc.
Maybe some kind of medical program, so probably a decent amount of meds and first aid equipment, in addition to whatever is in the nurse’s office.
A culinary program, so you have a well equipped kitchen and probably a decent amount of food on-hand.
Maybe it even has some sort of agricultural program with some farming equipment, maybe even some ready-to-go planted crops and possibly livestock.
Most schools are fairly secure with limited entrances and locking doors often they have backup generators and maybe even solar these days (odds are any school with a decent electrical program at least has a few solar panels kicking around somewhere) and you have the tools and maybe the materials there to further fortify it as needed.
And it probably has some pretty beefy fire suppression systems since you have teenagers playing with welders and industrial stoves/ovens.
Some college campuses might be as good or better for the same reasons, with the added benefits of there probably being some purpose-made living quarters, but they’re usually less compact, which has its plusses and minuses, more land to grow crops and such but harder to secure.
And if the apocalypse hits while school is in session, you have a bunch of young, hopefully reasonably-healthy people already on-hand to do some of the hard work if like me you’re not quite as spry as you used to be.
Walmart or similar has food, tools, guns, ammo, chemicals, and the building can be secured via steel shutters.
Yeah but the materials you have to work with are a little limited. At least around me, Walmart doesn’t carry much in the way of stuff like lumber, pipe, or other building materials, and there’s gonna be some gaps in the tools available, I don’t think most Walmarts carry welders around me, and even if they do you certainly wouldn’t be able to get the gases you need for MIG/TIG welding there, and you might want that if you, for example, need to repair those steel shutters.
And most Walmarts around me actually don’t carry guns.
And you can’t grow too much food on a parking lot, you can try to work with containers and potting soil of course, but odds are a school is gonna have more land you can easily convert to a food plot or maybe even the plumbing parts to get some kind of hydroponics system going.
Just any yard with a distinct lack of my milkshakes really.
If I can automatically secure the location, then I pick the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Ok. But why?
Costco.
Small number of secure entrances. A lifetime supply of batteries and solar kits. Tons of shelf stable food and drink. Clothing. Tacky home decor to make the apocalypse feel more homey.
It would be great.
Fully stocked pharmacy, comfy mattresses, tvs and video games, car batteries and inverters to run the entertainment, and sometimes even citrus trees to prevent scurvy.
Downside is that without power to the building you have a lot of work to do to dump all the fresh food before it stinks up the place. That dairy cooler alone would get disgusting real quick.
It would be great if there wasn’t thousands of other people in your city who had the exact same idea.
Immediate suicide for me, I’m afraid.
A yacht. It’s got solar power, water desalination, can get to uninhabited islands
Maybe if it has sails. Otherwise you’re exposed each time you need to refuel at a port. But ferrying about between uninhabited islands for resources and sleeping on the boat sounds like a decent plan.
Well… If I knew how to sail, that is. Or tie proper knots.
It’s also assuming that the zombies can’t swim or walk on the seabed, which they usually can’t
At some point you have to assume that even if they can walk on the seabed that the physical pressure would just disintegrate their bodies. If the powers of necromantic reanimation can be overcome with a sword or a shotgun then surely several atmospheres of pressure applied across the entire body would do it.
I don’t know where the best options are for sure, but one perk of a (sail) yacht is that, unless port facilities are specifically a problem, even if some place other than a yacht is the best place to be, the yacht is probably one of the better places to get at least near the place in question.
One downside: I don’t know how much maintenance a sail yacht requires. Like, I don’t know long long one could last without access to spare parts. The ocean puts physical stress on boats, and saltwater is corrosive. Boats aren’t usually designed for long-term operations away from land.
Another perk is that if the fuel production and distribution system breaks down, if what you have is a sail yacht, you probably have one of the present-day sailing vessels available, and I’d imagine that some level of sail-based trade could show up again; it was historically an important way to move goods around. You’re probably comparatively-well suited to an “apocalypse economy” where transportation and distribution is degraded.
