Why a Zombie Proof Fence?

Because you need one--at least if you expect to survive a zombie apocalypse. I personally recommend one that will stand up to zombies in ones and twos and threes and dozens and hundreds. This actually needs to be a wall unless you already live inside a walled compound, in which case an actual fence will work (in case a few strays slip inside the wall).

I got to thinking about this one day, for no particular reason, and started wondering about the design of such a fence (or wall). At the time, I was thinking more along the lines of how to protect my house from a few zombies and eventually started wondering how to protect larger areas--and how to cope with vast mobs...in the hundreds, even thousands.

The mobs are the real problem--if you have a wall or other passive obstacle, the mob will clump up until it makes living ramp of flesh allowing zombies to just walk right over the top a-la- Castle Roogna (though that may have been goblins, I forget). Once inside, these super mobs are nigh impossible to stop--you probably won’t have the kind of heavy weapons that would quickly stop them, and most people won’t have enough ammunition to make more than a dent in a super-mob. If you hole up, they can rip through barricades, pile up to reach second, even third stories of buildings and well, you get the idea: a fence just won’t do. Neither will a wall that’s just sitting there.

What you need is a high wall, carefully constructed, manned and maintained by an active security force. Integrated zombie disposal systems will make it even better by preventing the super mobs from building up. Such a wall could hold back hundreds, even thousands of the nasty things. This protection creates a zombie free area, a safe zone, a green zone where ordinary people can work and play.

As I whittled away at the engineering, another thought drifted into my head--wouldn’t it be easy to live with zombies? Not quite as carefree as what we have now, but certainly not as bad as most zombie movies make it out to be. In fact, it would be so easy that even little kids would be safe. To children who grew up like this, it would feel normal to live behind a wall while flesh-eating zombies roamed free and hungry on the other side. They would probably think it odd for dead to stay dead. This line of thinking led me to the principle characters in the story--kids who take zombies for granted, accepting them as a normal part of their lives.

This idea ultimately led to a novel, but I kept fence in the title since Zombie Proof Wall just doesn’t sound as good.

In scouring the web for other references to a zombie proof fence I found a miniatures game that looks pretty good: All Things Zombie by Two Hour Games. Also found Shelldrake, a guy here on blogger who does some great miniatures work. Here is a household/block kind of fence Shelldrake put together for the miniatures game: zombie proof fence.

-M