Yeah even in Britain if 90% plus of the population are on their arse it would be easy to lay hands on more ammunition than you re likely to ever need just from the sporting goods stores, and that's without considering the army bases. Also if ammo really runs out I'm pretty good with a bow too and you can make arrows
Wait a minute, Sclavus, you mean the concept of zombies already pre-exists in your story's universe? That's odd. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen it done outside of the comedy genre. Almost all zombie media takes place in a universe where the concept of zombies is something that has never existed before. The reason is quite simple - if they're already familiar with zombies, they're a lot easier for the characters to deal with. Somebody could just go, "Oh, I know what to do, I saw all this in a movie once!" and there goes half your excitement. It cuts down on a lot of the struggle your characters have to deal with. Whereas, without that concept in place, they must learn everything for themselves - first of all, that these people are actually dead and there's nothing left of their personality (and therefore okay to kill), how to kill them, how the infection spreads, etc.... And then there's the thing you're asking about - if all this zombie media we know of exists in their world, they'll think it's a hoax. Whereas if they've never heard of this before, their reaction is likely to be more serious and urgent. May I ask, is there any particular reason you're doing it this way? Does the characters' prior awareness of zombies have any bearing on the plot?
I actually don't understand why this is. If zombies are something that can happen in a world, then it would make sense that it has either happened before, or, if someone created them, there would have been some sort of legend to inspire them. It's not like some kind of magic comet dust could have started the epidemic. I think a good way to raise the stakes would be to have someone be like, "I know how to do this, I saw it in a movie once." and then have it fail miserably. That way, not only would the characters be in danger from the zombies, but they'd have that little bubble of false security burst and have to deal with the threat properly.
I'd probably treat is as though it were a terrorist attack. Because I work in Manhattan, my wife and I have detailed plans of evacuation in the event of a terrorist attack or nuclear strike. I'd probably assume it was a joke at first, but if I saw them, I'd probably get uptown to my wife. I'll have a bat or pipe or something for defense, then we'd head to the east river and bribe someone with a boat to take us across to Jersey. If I'd actually seen complete chaos, and the power grid was out, I might seriously injure someone to steal their boat, but I'd like to think I wouldn't kill anyone yet unless it was in defense. Then I'd head for the country where I grew up. I feel like zombie movies and shows overestimate the population density of rural USA and that a handful of houses with guns (which is most of them) would be fairly safe from the horde.
Yes. Britain has historically been one of the global centres of the arms trade. You may not be able to buy a pistol over the counter no-questions-asked like you could a century ago, but I remember gun store ads in the 90s for machineguns, RPGs and all kinds of other fun stuff for export only. You could get tooled up pretty well from one of those gun stores, if you could find them. As for me, I'd probably bunker down and start looking up Youtube videos on how to make silencers before the Internet went away. Loud gun + zombies == bad day.
Tbh with two shot guns and three rifles in the house (and a load more next door) I'm already pretty well tooled up for the ZA ... One of the shotguns would be becoming a sawn off pistol until I was able to lay my hands on a glock (the rifles already have silencers btw)
Yeah, it's kind of amusing that silencers are OMG EVIL! in Canada, but just about anyone can buy them in the UK (when I lived there, I don't think there were any restrictions on them?). On the other hand, we can buy a 'sawn-off' pump-action shotgun that you can carry in a belt holster in case you run into a hungry bear.
yeah - pistols are virtually impossible to own, and if you do you arent supposed to silence them (although any competent machinist could make a rifle silencer fit) but for rifles silencers are no problem .... given how easy they are to make trying to make them illegal is a bit of a nonsense anyway. Of course you can only fully silence a subsonic round, if the bullet breaks the sound barrier you'll get a crack regardless of any silencer fitted. Which in practice means you can silence a .22 or .243 vermin round easily enough, but probably not a .308 deer rifle, and definitely not a .338 magnum or larger If noise was a real problem i'd use a bow - also helps that you can make arrows easily enough so amunition isnt a problem
I think most people would assume it's a hoax at first, or that they were witnessing a movie being filmed. That tends to be a problem when something horrific happens in a place where there's a lot of filming--people don't believe what they're seeing is real at first and think they've stumbled into a film shoot. I would probably assume the news report was an erroneous report that had come from people misunderstanding that a movie was being filmed.
