<span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"><span class="bbc_u"><strong>Quick notes on the zombies</strong></span></span><br/><br/>The zombies are the Romero type, slow and unsteady, you can walk away from them if you set a reasonable pace. However there are a lot of them, they are truly dead so you need to destroy the hind brain to drop them (not quite all head-shots work, though most will), they hear very well, their sense of smell is okay yet after the first day or two their eyesight is poor.<br/><br/>Zombie eyes go white after a day or two, not immediately, as they do not either blink or have working tear ducts to clean their eyes. Little particles of all kinds of gritty and dusty nastiness settle in and scratch up their corneas or just refract light on its way into the eyes. Fresh zombies are obvious from their moaning, their shuffling, their lust for your flesh, but not from their white eyes. Fresh zombies still have eyesight as good as they had in life and as predators have eyes keyed to notice and lock in on movement.<br/><br/>Once they know there is good tasty human food in a place they will make it a priority and try to break in. If something distracts them they will shuffle off in that direction of course, including feeding moans from other zombies if sufficient time has passed for them to 'forget' quite why they wanted into the building they are trying to break into. They are as strong as they were in life yet they feel no pain and will not let go of something without having something else grab their attention. If you are grabbed by one of these things its likely to be very bad news indeed. They do not care about accidentlly breaking their bones or tearing muscle, sinew and or ligaments from their bone anchors. They will literally tear themselves apart from the inside in order to lay teeth on prey. Once they have hold of prey they do not let go of it. They are incredibly single minded and will retain their grip at any cost, including tearing themselves apart.<br/><br/>They are not completely mindless and some are cleverer than others. Generally the more intelligent in life the better a chance there is of retaining that in death, though the chances of much understanding in one of these creatures is very low. The brighter ones could theoretically be trained to perform tasks.<br/><br/>They do rot, but the process is slowed down somehow and a zombie disintegrating to the point where its no longer a threat, at least without outside influence such as crushing or running water, could take a decade or two.<br/><br/>They have no body temperature and will freeze at temperatures bellow zero fairly quickly. Once winter sets in its time to loot the town, break as many zombie heads open as possible (digging through the snow to find them as necessary) meet up with other survivors and start to think about building walls and tearing up parking lots to plant fields.<br/><br/>They are dead, they mean to make you dead and they will kill you and eat you.<br/><br/>They will bring down prey in order to feed, feeding is their main impulse, once they have some meat in their mouth they may loose temporary interest in the prey while they chew and swallow long enough for that prey, if it can, to escape. However by that point its too late for the prey anyway.<br/><br/>Once bitten a healthy human has at most a few days to live.<br/><br/>They are as hardy as a normal human is. The skull, especially across the brow has a thick bone plate which is hard to pierce. Guns are a great way to bring them down with head-shots, yet make a lot of noise, which attracts more of them. Knives mean coming close, swords and bows require a lot of skill to use and in the case of swords, also coming in close, though not as close as knives.<br/><br/>Fighting hand to hand should be a last resort. Shooting is potentially suicidal without a very large amount of ammo and the coolest head imaginable along with several friends similarly equipped.<br/><br/>In ones and twos a trained and confident human properly equipped with a sword can easily hold their own and do extremely well, yet will tire in time, or break their blade, or miss a cut or thrust. There are billions of dead things out there by the end of the first week.<br/><br/>Zombies. Serious business.<br/><br/>Keep quiet, only fight if you have to, rescue everyone you can but beware of bites, wait for winter, use the cold the cold is your friend, retake the town.<br/><br/><hr/><br/>Inspiration for the strength and tenacity of the zombies and how they will tear themselves apart to reach living flesh can be found in the following image, though the reader is warned the account is harrowing and deeply disturbing. I don't know if its a true account of real events or not and frankly, I don't want to know either way.<br/><br/><em>Click the image to enlarge it for reading. Click it again once you have read more than you really ought to have done. Don't say I didn't warn you.</em><br/>(http://chanarchive.org/content/14_x/12423888/1366060351007.jpg)