When you locate an enemy army to engage, you will do none of these things. You are not a typical commander, and you are not commanding a typical army. That is why you will win the day and crush your enemy utterly.
When a horde of zombies comes on some tasty humans, the horde doesn’t draw up a plan of attack. It doesn’t wait till dawn because doing so is poetic or traditional. It just attacks. Then and there. It could be dawn’s first light or two in the morning. It could be sunny, stormy, foggy, raining locusts, or earthquaking. Zombies don’t care. They will still attack.
Moving slowly. Preying upon things. Sound like anybody you know? Of course it does. It sounds like zombies.
Zombies are natural pirates because they are already attuned to a “life” of roaming and attacking. They take what they need (brains), and leave what they don’t need (everything else). Zombies also understand—or seem to understand—that remaining stationary means destruction.
Zombies, like pirates, aren’t hard to kill on a one-on-one basis. They die with a simple decapitation or musket ball to the head. They tend to move slowly. (Pirates may have peg legs, but zombies have crushing rigor mortis and tendons that have often rotted away entirely. While pirates are often drunk and/or delusional, zombies comport themselves with the kind of massive loss of function that only comes with years spent moldering in a graveyard.) If you want to catch up with a single roaming zombie, it’s not going to be hard to put him down provided you have even the most basic of weapons. A stationary zombie is completely a lost cause. (A stationary zombie is also not going to get to eat anybody’s brain.) That’s why every zombie—no matter how desiccated and bony, no matter how many limbs or appendages it may be missing—always drags itself along and is always in a group. Movement and comradeship mean survival and the possibility of delicious brains. Inactivity and isolation mean destruction and no brains.
Zombie Tip—You must become expert at waiting patiently if you wish to fight with the effectiveness of the walking dead.
While a single roaming zombie may seem like a threat to very few—and may, in fact, seem quite comical and amusing—a horde of zombies (or a pirate ship bursting at the seams with them) is a terrifying sight to behold. Zombies and pirates move slowly, but as long as they move (and as long as there are a lot of them) they are still a threat.
When a stuffy British navy lookout cries “Pirates off the starboard bow!” it may still be a full hour from this first sighting until these piratical aggressors have moved close enough to put their cannons in range.
Yet, the fact that it will, you know, be awhile before the pirates get here does nothing to diminish the alarm and anxiety that the British sailors suddenly feel. Same thing with a zombie outbreak. When the first few walking corpses shamble into the fledgling settlement that will one day become Port-au-Prince, the villagers can easily evade and avoid these slow-moving visitors. However, the abject terror they feel will come not from these two or three brain-seeking interlopers, but from their knowledge that the main burying ground just outside town holds hundreds of corpses—who at this very moment may be clawing their way out of the earth and heading toward the smell of living humans.
In both cases, slow is scary. In both cases, the fact that any real physical danger is like an hour away does nothing to quell the concerns of those who will be preyed upon.
As a zombie pirate captain, you’re going to be doubly slow. Your boat is slow and your pirates are slow. The good news is that you’re also going to be doubly terrifying to your enemies (and just doubly awesome, generally). When a trading ship laden with spoils from the New World sights your rotting zombie bark off the starboard bow, the captain will understand that your ship is a massive pirate barge (slow) and—when he looks more closely—that your crew is composed entirely of lumbering, loping zombies (slower). Your lack of speed, however, will cease to occupy the unlucky merchant’s mind to the same degree as your lack of compunction about eating him and everyone else aboard. He will also, as he thinks about it, become creepingly aware of the terrifying advantages that zombie pirates will bring to bear against him.
Though their ship might move slowly through the water, the zombies steering it will never tire or rest. They will never need to sleep. They will never run out of provisions. While a merchant’s crew is prey to every human weakness and failing, your inhuman zombie pirate crew can work around the clock to chase the merchant to some craggy shoal where he will have to choose between fleeing overboard or putting up a (bootless) armed resistance. As much as he may hate you, he will not have time to scuttle his craft.
As you internalize the Code of Zombie Piracy, embrace your inner slowness. Understand that it works for you, and not against you. Zombie pirate crews—much like hordes of terrestrial zombies on foot—always get their man.
Eventually.
The Zombie Army: What power-hungry despot hasn’t considered making some sort of deal with the devil in order to command a host of the undead? And sure, a zombie army might look attractive at first. The advantages of zombie soldiers are plentiful. They don’t need to be fed, paid, or billeted between battles. They can march all night without stopping. They don’t complain about being sent to their almost certain destruction, and they can keep fighting after sustaining injuries that would leave a normal soldier prone and shouting for a medic.
That said, there are important ways in which the zombie army fails to perform essential functions of human armies. Prisoners, for example, are usually eaten by zombie troops before they can reveal to you any useful information about enemy encampments. Tactical withdrawals and disengagements are not usually in the zombie soldier’s vocabulary. (Once a zombie smells brains, it’s on!) Further, your enemy can usually disengage your zombie army whenever he wants (provided his troops can manage a slow jog), whereas your force will have considerable difficulty in pursuit. Most troubling of all, zombie armies tend not to disband when the military campaign is concluded. Instead, they’ll turn on the residents of whatever country or kingdom you’ve used them to capture, turning the very prize you fought for into a desolate wasteland that only a zombie could love. Then, when there is nobody else left, the zombie army will turn on you. But hey, what did you expect? When you dance with the devil, he always gets to lead. And in this case, he’ll lead you right into the middle of a zombie army with nothing else to do.
The important lesson to take here is that a zombie works only for himself (or herself). Sure, a zombie’s self-interest may momentarily coincide with your own, but at the end of the day, a zombie looks out for number one. So should you.
Don’t get me started on “regular” pirates.
Oh sure, being a pirate is one thing. It’s all “Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum, and when do we get to go on the next murderin’, plunderin’, womanizin’-spree?”
Being a pirate is fine and dandy.
But leading a group of pirates? That’s a pain in the ass right there.
Did you ever wonder why pirate captains like Long John Silver and Blackbeard and Captain Kidd have reputations for being such dicks? Trust me, they didn’t start out that way. Blackbeard and others of his ilk got to be complete and total bastards for one reason and one reason only. They were called upon to do the impossible: manage pirates.
Think about the worst employee you ever saw at the worst job you ever had. Think about their self-centeredness, their inability to be a “team player,” their proclivity for physically attacking coworkers whenever they felt like it. Now multiply those traits about a thousand times, and you’ve got some sense of the workplace behavior you find in somebody who wants to be a pirate.
Wait! You’re not fucking done yet. Now take that worst-coworker-times-1,000 and multiply him or her by an entire crew of pirates. And now imagine you’re the one who has to get these ADHD, violence-prone, self-centered drunkards to somehow focus and work together. Even a veteran behavioral psychologist would grant that these people are not going to respond to “positive reinforcement” and “disciplina
ry timeouts.” (Also, Ritalin is still like three hundred years away.)
So what’s left? Well, as any pirate captain—no matter how initially beneficent—always learns, pirates tend only to respond to the most base, primal motivators. They want gold and plunder, and they want not to die (probably in that order, but hey, it’s not hard and fast with these guys). To get regular pirates to do anything, you have to threaten to kill them or reward them with treasure. Anything less, and it’s just one more step toward an ineffective crew that is going to start thinking about how good a mutiny sounds. For a pirate captain seeking to motivate his crew, the “carrot” has to be brimming with gold and jewels, and the “stick” should be the tip of a cutlass or the end of a plank.
The captain of a ship of zombie pirates can remain a totally awesome dude (or seriously cool chick) while still managing a crew effectively and efficiently. Why? Because you don’t have to be a violent jerk to get zombies to do what you want them to do.
Zombies are easy to lead, at least compared to pirates. Zombies don’t want money. They don’t seek fame or fortune. They don’t lust for sexual intercourse. Most important for you, zombies don’t aspire to be pirate captains themselves, so nobody’s gunning for your job. In fact, they don’t care at all about rank or promotion. (You won’t have lickspittles falling all over themselves wanting to be first mate.) Zombies have no egos or career aspirations. They have only an uncontrollable thirst to feast on the flesh of the living. (This is something that, as a pirate captain, you ought to be able to provide them if you’re worth your weight in sea salt.) Pull your bark alongside a British merchant vessel or Portuguese caravel, point them in the right direction, and the rest is a cakewalk.
Further—in sharp contrast to conventional, living pirates—zombies are infinitely replaceable. While a pirate captain commanding human pirates might flinch at the cost (both in human life and capital investment) of sending a boarding party to their almost-certain doom against a better-armed foe, the captain of a zombie crew need have no such compunction. When you know the right voodoo shaman or enchanted burying ground, zombies can be replaced with relative ease and at a reasonable price. Also, you can send wave after wave of zombie pirates to be destroyed without any deleterious effect on the morale of the zombie pirates who must follow after them. They will still be willing to fight for the death for you in any situation. This brings me to my next point . . .
Zombies have complete faith in your judgment. So what if your last ten voyages ended in ruinous defeat? So what if you’ve been defeated by European navies so many times that your nickname is “The Bitch of the Seas”? Zombies will not lose one single ounce of confidence in your leadership ability, no matter how much of an incompetent starveling you might appear to be (or might actually be). Zombie pirates will always follow you to the ends of the earth (or at least to where there are brains).
Zombies are also stalwart fighters compared to human pirates. As the cannonballs and grapeshot start to fly, you’ll be glad to have them on your side. When you employ zombies for piracy, you get a crew that will fight to the “death” every time. Both zombie pirates and regular pirates are fundamentally selfish entities, but, for zombies, the selfish motivations are quite simple. Zombies want to kill humans and eat brains. That’s it. Regular pirates want a slew of things (plunder, women, fame, blah blah blah), but they also want to not die or be destroyed in the course of getting stuff. Zombies do not have this keep-living-and-not-die “hang-up” appended to their collective psychology. Zombies just go for the gusto. A crew of zombie pirates will not hesitate to attack larger vessels, it will not flee or surrender when the tide of battle (or the literal tide) goes against them, and they will never show “fear” in the traditional sense of the word.
Speaking of fear, perhaps the greatest advantage of commanding a crew of zombie pirates is the amount of fear you will strike in the hearts of your enemies. Regular pirates are, of course, already pretty frightening for merchant ships laden with goods and passengers. Pirates go into battle drunk and singing songs. They don’t wear uniforms. They howl like animals and smoke hashish and set their beards on fire. Most terrifyingly of all, pirates don’t play by the rules. They recognize the legitimacy of no government or treaty. The captured will live or die on the pirates’ whim. Station, title, and wealth will not protect anyone in the presence of a pirate. However, at least pirates are, you know, human. They can be (to a point) reasoned with. Propositions like: “If you spare my life I’ll lead you to where my treasure is buried” at least have the capacity to be entertained. Human pirates have been known to allow captured voyagers to become pirates themselves and “enlist” in the crew (which can be an attractive option when the other choice is walking the plank). Zombie pirates don’t dance or cavort as they go into battle—and they certainly don’t drink rum—but they have the capacity to inspire a terror even beyond that of a traditional pirate. When a merchant or enemy navy encounters zombie pirates, there are only going to be three possible outcomes—defeat the zombie pirates, outrun the zombie pirates, or get eaten by the zombie pirates. No other thing is going to happen. You will not reason with them. You will not bribe them into letting you live. You will not flatter them into submission. It’s kill or be killed. That’s it. And speaking of killing, zombies are also hard-to-kill, tenacious fighters, so suiting up to fight a bunch of zombie pirates is way, way more daunting than getting ready to fight conventional pirates.
Whereas the sound of drunken pirate song (and the sight of a Jolly Roger) rightly inspire fear in merchants and navies alike, it is the wafting stench of charnel earth, the eerie stillness and unflinching focus of a pirate ship crewed by zombies, that inspires the ultimate, cosmic terror in those who behold it.
Also, we’ve got to look at job performance. Zombies are the ultimate nautical warriors. Zombies are equally effective on land or on the sea. Or in the sea. When they’re not busy fighting sharks or other awesome things, zombie pirates can walk or swim underwater with relative ease. They can also attack. Whereas human sailors who fall overboard in the course of nautical warfare tend to drop their sabers, get their powder wet, and suddenly focus less on “attacking the enemy” and more on “trying not to fucking drown,” zombies who are tossed overboard and fall into the sea simply begin attacking from a new direction. In situations where human pirates will selfishly want a rescue, zombie pirates require no intervention.
One thing to take from all this is that if organizing and running a zombie pirate crew sounds like a lot of work, just stop for a second and think about how hard it would be to run an actual human pirate crew. Suddenly, guys who stumble around and moan for “braaaaains” won’t be such a big issue for you.
For these and other reasons, the Code of Zombie Piracy directs that you shall be the only human pirate aboard your ship. From here on out, it’s all zombie.
SECTION 5
Undead on Wall Street: Winning on the Corporate Battlefield
In times of increasing economic uncertainty, the slow and steady gait of a zombie can be a supremely effective model for those seeking to improve their station in life vis a vis a rise through the corporate ladder. For what is the marketplace of unfettered capitalism if not a battlefield? What is the boardroom, if not a military HQ? And what is the office supply closet, if not a cache of the deadliest and most advanced weapons of slaughter ever known to man—and maybe also a place to make out with attractive coworkers where nobody can see?
Achieving success in a traditional corporate setting is about two things:
1. Fitting in with the culture, and
2. Making sure the job gets done.
Zombies come from varied backgrounds, but always make sure to be uniform in all the ways that count. They come fat and thin, tall and short, with all four limbs still intact and with just a few clumps of gristle (that might have once been appendages) attached to a torso. But their gait is the same. Their unseeing (all-seeing?) thousand yard stare is the same. Their desire to consume living human
brains is definitely the same. Zombies are identical in all the ways that are truly meaningful. They also know how to deliver where and when it counts. Corporate leaders want to see top producers. They want employees who can deliver the goods. And when “deliver” means “eating,” and “the goods” means “a school bus full of screaming, terrified children” zombies become the most effective model available for comporting oneself in a way certain to make those in the corridors of corporate power take notice. Zombies deliver. They make things work. They are always working. For them, distinction between work and play has lost all meaning. And, in this, they have found true meaning. An aspiring business executive setting his or her sights on a corner office would do well to attempt the same.
Are you instead interested in going out on your own? The tech startup entrepreneur has plenty to learn from the slavering legion of undead. Finding small holes in the landscape that have not yet been filled, and then working to fill them before any of your business school chums can, is very like a zombie. The undead are excellent at surveying landscapes and finding openings and holes to fill—especially when those holes are entrances to castles, hastily fortified farmhouses, or abandoned prisons. Zombies have an innate sense of where opening might exist, and know all about exploiting those opening for the maximum brain-eating advantage possible. Perhaps your goal is to upset and destroy a traditional business model like taxi services, restaurant reviews, or physically going to a store to buy anything at all, ever. Zombies shall serve as your example here as well. Zombies are the original agents of destruction and chaos. In their rampaging wake, entire lines of business can be decimated (or at least irreversibly altered), and exciting new “innovations” can spring up in their wake. From corpse decapitation services to lawnmower weaponizing, zombies are catalysts of innovation and capitalism. They seed new businesses wherever they tread. Where they have gone before, the landscape is indelibly altered for good. And at the end of the day, isn’t this what any corporate leader really wants?
The Ultimate Book of Zombie Warfare and Survival Page 8
