Tony Faville - Kings of the Dead

My name is Tony, although I have gone by many nicknames in the past, Doc Hardball and Chef just to name a couple. These days my friends have given me a new nickname.

I am Zombie Hunter Tony.

I never thought it would happen to me thats funny, I always thought I would be writing that in one of those tacky Penthouse Forum letters. You know the ones, you go to check the mail and next thing you know you are getting done by the mail lady, the MILF next door and a couple of cheerleaders. Not like that situation ever happened to me but I can almost guarantee you, it never happened to the other people that wrote those letters either.

No, what I never thought would happen is exactly what happened about 6 weeks ago.

The dead started to walk.

It actually started almost a year ago with the swine flu pandemic. Damn virus kept mutating to the point that it started to kill with rampant wholesale, and then those it killed started to get up and kill. Before we knew it, it was like one of those shampoo commercials, Ill tell four people, and theyll tell four people and on and on.

Only in this reality you change the tell to kill.

It took months to get to that stage though and to be honest with you, I can tell you exactly when it started happening. When they started giving the vaccinations.

It was in the damn shots!

Nobody I have met since it all started got the shot.

Everyone I know that got the vaccine has died. Some of those I knew got back up after dying and I put them down.

Let me back up a little on my history. In the early 1980s I saw a movie late one night that changed my life, Dawn of the Dead by the zombie master himself, George A. Romero. Since that time I have watched every zombie movie I could get my hands on, read every book, comic book, journal, listened to every podcast, etc.

I really dug the entire concept of the Zombie genre. It was the what if scenario that really got to me.

What if the dead rose?

What if zombies were real?

What if the world went to shit?

I started preparing for this to happen several years ago. Stockpiling food, weapons, first aid, miscellaneous supplies and, most importantly, people.

People that were of like minds. People with skill sets that would be necessary in a PAW, or post-apocalyptic world. Construction, medicine, farming, shooting, tactical operators, mechanics, people like that.

Now dont get me wrong. We NEVER thought zombies were really going to get back up and start doing the hokey-pokey. That was just the stuff we used to make what we were doing more interesting.

No, we were doing this mostly based on the potential of natural and social disasters. Earthquakes, fires, floods, anarchy, whatever you can envision.

I would not consider any of us to be Survivalists, at least not in the medias definition of the word. We are good people, family people. Just relatively normal people that are, or were willing to do whatever it takes to survive. Our earthquake never came.

Zombies sure as hell did though.

Before it all started we had our designated bug out location, or BOL. It is a nice quiet wooded area with fresh running water and far away from the big cities. That location is exactly where we have been for the past 8 weeks.

We held a meeting, made the decision that it was time to go, loaded up our stuff and got the hell out of town.

Now, didnt I say the dead started to rise 6 weeks ago? And did I not just say we headed out 8 weeks ago?

Yeah, I did.

The time for preparation is not when a ghoul is gnawing on your throat or pulling your entrails from a hand-torn gash in your abdomen. No, the time for preparation is before that happens.

We could see the signs. We knew what was coming. If we were wrong, then we would all be taking a nice long camping trip and looking for jobs when we came back out of the woods.

Fact is, we were not wrong. Things got worse, daily.

People used to laugh at us because we were a bunch of zombie geeks, fanboys, survival nuts, gun freaks. You name it, we were labeled as such.

We have a new label, one that we wear with pride-we are the Kings of the Dead and we will survive.

Lets talk about these undead zombie-like creatures. Hey, you know what, Im here, Im living it, Ill call them whatever in the hell I want to call them.

Zombies.

What did the movies teach us about zombies?

They are the walking dead brought back to life by radioactive space dust, the fact that hell ran out of vacancies, space aliens, voodoo priests and various other sundry choices. They eat the flesh of the living, whether it is brains, arms, necks, intestines, you name it. They either shamble or haul ass depending on who is telling the story.

You must destroy the brain or do enough damage to their body in order to ultimately destroy them. If we take the zombies from the Return of the Living Dead series of movies, they speak, they move quickly, use radios, costumes and tools, and destroy every damn thing in their path. In all stories, a bite or scratch from one of the infected will take out one of the living.

So, what do I know about these zombies?

H1N1 Vaccinethat was what did it. Okay, sure, Im not a scientist and I dont know that for sure. But its all I have to go on and I am holding on tight to it.

Some of the guys have even joked around a bit and called it the H1Z1 virus.

Cool, whatever.

Oh, they dont run.

Let me just say a couple of things about this fact.

Number one, THANK GOD!!

Number two, this is actually to be expected. When a person dies, the body starts to break down immediately, things like tendons lose their elasticity and muscles stop working. Since these creatures are obviously dying before they turn, the natural order of things has not and will not change.

I dont care what the bug is in their head making them get up and move, they are dead. They are not going to run or be able to do anything more complex than a simple grab.

I have seen a handful of them attempting to run since this all started and I have seen the same results. Its typically the achilles tendon that fails first, then the knees and the hamstring.

You may have the mother of all viruses in your brain making you do all sorts of crazy shit but without working wheels brother, youre not walking anywhere, let alone running with all the tenacity of a decathlete.

Back to my zombies - they eat flesh. They seem to resort to the most animalistic instincts of survival and go for the softest spots to feed doing everything in their power to get a bite into any part of you they can.

One of the things I always learned in the self defense courses I took is that you have to be prepared for every fight to wind up on the ground. Even when dealing with humans you take a chance on getting bit or scratched. Get into a ground fight with a creature that only has the weapons of biting and scratching?

Trust me on this, the best defense is a good offense. If the opportunity to shoot one of these things from a distance is presented to you, take it! Never let a zombie get within grabbing distance from you. If you do, then you just may be the next zombie I have to put down.

Please allow me to make this commentI may not like it, but I will do it.

Taking them down? Well, headshots have been working pretty damn well so far. With that being said, I have seen a few go down where I was unable to discern a successful headshot. But Im not going to waste any ammo with body shots unless I absolutely have to.