WEATHER

You put on a coat and take an umbrella when it rains. You wear shades and shorts when it’s hot. You put on a scarf and mittens when it’s cold. Currently, the only way most of us are affected by the weather is by planning our daily wardrobe around what mother nature throws at us. Trust me, though, when the apocalypse takes hold the weather will help and hinder you in equal measure and it will become much more than a topic for small talk with the cashier when you’re buying your egg and cress sandwich on your lunch break. Consider the following:

Rain

Most of us see rain as a bit annoying. It gets us wet and makes leaving the house an unpleasant experience. However, in a zombie apocalypse, our perception of the weather is likely to be flipped on its head.

Rain will have many plus points. First, it is water and it is falling from the sky. Water will be in short supply. The mains supply may have become compromised, you’ll have scavenged every bottle of Evian from the local stores and drinking your own urine is will have become repetitive. So, when it starts to rain, simply place a few buckets on your roof and you will have all the supplies you need.

Rain will also have a cleansing effect on the area around you. Bloodstained streets will be washed clean and chunks of rotting flesh will flow down the gutter, helping to remove things that may cause disease and smell.

From an aesthetic point of view, rain will also clean up any zombies that are caught outside in it. Removing dirt and congealed blood making them easier on the eye and less terrifying to look at.

Rain will also help things grow should you be trying to cultivate your own foodstuff in a safe area of your sanctuary.

Do be aware that rain isn’t always a good thing, though. As basic drainage systems degrade due to lack of upkeep, flooding will become more likely. This may compromise any areas that you inhabit on ground floors or below (see Underground) but as long as you keep high and your building is strong enough to withstand a flood, you should be safe.

Heat

As I said, our perception will be flipped on its head and intense sun and heat will no longer be something we look forward to.

Prepare o dread those hot summer days – ice-cream and building sandcastles will be a thing of the past. Long periods of heat will cause drought and will mean that you will find water supplies harder to come by. Heat will also cause lethargy and exhaustion in your team members, especially if there is a low supply of water. High temperatures will aid in the rotting process, and although this will speed up the demise of our undead friends, it will also increase the smell of rotting meat and increase the amount of disease-spreading insects which will be buzzing around.

The only good thing about the sun is that you will get a lovely tan, which will stop you being mistaken for a member of the undead by other survivors.

Cold

In extreme cold temperatures, zombies will freeze. This does not mean that they will ‘die’. It means they will freeze solid and then reanimate again once they have thawed. The unfortunate thing about this is that you will also freeze in extremely low temperatures and you are unlikely to carry on as normal once you have thawed out – because the extreme cold will have killed you. In cold weather it is best to stay within your safe house and attempt to keep warm until the temperature heats up as cold weather can slow down a person’s response time and, like heat, induce lethargy.

Snow will also be a problem. Zombies will become buried in snow banks meaning that you have to be extra careful when making what would normally be a simple walk down the road as you don’t know what could be concealed beneath the blanket of snow. If snow can be collected, though, it can be melted down to increase your supply of water.

Fog

Do you really think it’s a good idea to go wandering out into thick, pea-soup fog when there’s an apocalypse on? Do you not watch horror movies? Or any movies for that matter? Fog isn’t good. It holds all kinds of scaries. Including, but not limited to, zombies. That you can’t see. Because of the fog!

Extreme weather

With a big red X as warranted by the cable TV show title. Typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, force ten gales; all these extreme weather conditions are generally associated with certain places on the planet. Surely it would be sensible then, should a zombie apocalypse occur, to move out of an area that is likely to have a typhoon season or is regularly battered by hurricanes. I know that it might be home. But what are you trying to prove? You just have to survive. You don’t REALLY have to survive. No one’s going to be impressed if you survived the zombie apocalypse AND a tornado. It’s not a competition. Hey! Once you’ve got through the tornado why not move to San Francisco and see if you can survive an earthquake too! And there’s an active volcano in Skamania County. Then you could go to space and see if you could get through a supernova. In fact, once you do, why don’t you just stay there, eh?