Ask Lemmy

Billionaire’s bunker island. Be the security guy with a gun that realizes that money doesn’t matter when civilization falls.

Costco.

Small number of secure entrances. A lifetime supply of batteries and solar kits. Tons of shelf stable food and drink. Clothing. Tacky home decor to make the apocalypse feel more homey.

It would be great.

Assuming zombies are incapable of any higher reasoning, somewhere only accessible by climbing up a ladder or rope.

It works in PZ, it might work IRL.

It entirely depends on what kind of zombies.

Just any yard with a distinct lack of my milkshakes.

A yacht. It's got solar power, water desalination, can get to uninhabited islands

On a tropical island somewhere. It might take a while to clear the whole island, but after that, it's a pretty good way to ride out the apocalypse...

hold up

And a bone apple tea to you!

a 1950s school building. they were built like castles. have wide open lawns and high towers. windows were at least a story above grade, and the glass had that mesh embedded inside.

any windows or doors that are at grade can easily be barricaded or already are with high grade steel cages.

bonus if there's an internal courtyard that can be used as a field for growing crops, water retention area, and just an outdoor exercise area.

schools already have a cafeteria and kitchen, showers, fitness and entertainment, first-aid and medical, an entire library, science/biological labs. many schools have also been retrofitted with solar panels as well.

a school is really the best place to hold up for any kind of natural disaster.

In any country with hot wet air. All insects would do a party in any Zombi near there.

Either that or someplace with bears, wolves or any other fauna that could "clean the place".

Where's safe? Where's familiar? Where can I smoke?

The Winchester!

Look, I need to spend my efforts on the toxicity and climate collapse apocalypse. I would WELCOME zombies at this point.

"Secure" as in "fortify it against zombies and potentially other threats"

Or as in "I can get to it and lay some sort of claim to it"

Because if it's the former, we probably need to put some restrictions on the scenario. That's really the hard part of this and we're just assuming we can do it, and your best bet is probably to secure as big of an area as possible. A city, a country, a whole hemisphere, or hell, the entire world or the solar system if we're being really silly.

If we're going with the latter, where we find a building or property of some kind and call "dibs" and the rest of it is up to us

I think a tech school is a pretty good bet, at least thinking of my local tech schools.

They have some fully stocked workshops with pretty much any tools and materials you could need- carpentry, plumbing, automotive, electrical, etc.

Maybe some kind of medical program, so probably a decent amount of meds and first aid equipment, in addition to whatever is in the nurse's office.

A culinary program, so you have a well equipped kitchen and probably a decent amount of food on-hand.

Maybe it even has some sort of agricultural program with some farming equipment, maybe even some ready-to-go planted crops and possibly livestock.

Most schools are fairly secure with limited entrances and locking doors often they have backup generators and maybe even solar these days (odds are any school with a decent electrical program at least has a few solar panels kicking around somewhere) and you have the tools and maybe the materials there to further fortify it as needed.

And it probably has some pretty beefy fire suppression systems since you have teenagers playing with welders and industrial stoves/ovens.

Some college campuses might be as good or better for the same reasons, with the added benefits of there probably being some purpose-made living quarters, but they're usually less compact, which has its plusses and minuses, more land to grow crops and such but harder to secure.

And if the apocalypse hits while school is in session, you have a bunch of young, hopefully reasonably-healthy people already on-hand to do some of the hard work if like me you're not quite as spry as you used to be.

An island? Seems like a great way to isolate yourself from the masses

Probably a Walmart. Lots of guns, food and medicine.

There was a movie/TV show where the character was hunkered down in a wind turbine. Always thought it was a clever idea.

Nice try.

~Never gonna eat my brains you sneaky zombie~

The hill country, of course. Long sightlines, rough terrain, low population, high ratio of guns to people.

Immediate suicide for me, I'm afraid.

Some island in the pacific

I got an old abandoned insane asylum on the top of a hill next to a naturally occurring spring kinda near me. You really couldn't ask for a better location. Farm on the roof.

From a security standpoint, if we're just talking zombies and assuming that the zombies can't climb, maybe a pre-cannon-era castle or similar fortification. I think that most of the things that obsoleted historic fortifications wouldn't really apply to zombies.

I don't mean one of the castle-themed buildings, like a folly. But something where you don't have any ground-level windows aside from slits, and probably has walls around it.

You may have defense-in-depth (multiple layers of walls or building structure, with the building and walls designed to permit a retreat to an inner area if an outer area is compromised).

Cisterns for freshwater storage are likely already present (though I've no idea what condition they might be in) so you don't need to get ahold of more storage.

Ample room for storage.

I guess the major issue might be the degree to which any fortifications might have been converted for public-access use. I don't know how many gates and porticullises might have been removed or disabled over the years because they aren't really necessary if the fortification is essentially a museum.

An island in the Stockholm archipellago.

Since we assume that you can secure any location picked, any location would be safe, you just need ground to grow crops and freshwater to drink.

My current location in rural Tasmania has some advantages. There would likely be a delay in the zombies getting here, so that gives us prep time. Low population density means fewer zombies to deal with when they do. Plenty of natural resources, food, and water.

My main issue is a lack of defensible buildings, but there are lots of wood mills so maybe something could be constructed.

The wildcard is Tassie devils, being a powerful scavenger species. Would they go for the walking corpses? If so, would they end up turning themselves, because I don't fancy dealing with zombie nocturnal marsupials with a bite that crushes bone.

I live next to the regional hospital, I'll probably be one of the first to turn into a zombie.

a bunker, completely underground and zombies cant get to you like in resident evil.

I speculate that in a real world zombie apocalypse scenario the zombies will probably be just one war crime out of many, Half Life 2 style, so it must be assumed that if you manage to fortify a location against zombies, that fortification is probably getting noticed by a drone and bombed or similar after not too long. Therefore instead of holing up, it would be a better strategy to focus on offense instead of defense in some way.

You want someplace with the infrastructure to support lots of people (or a few people for a long time), but little local population to compete for those resources. National parks are generally well stocked, with water and lodging to support peak tourist season, but at least in the western US, most are pretty far from major metropolitan areas.

Grand Canyon and Yellowstone have a lot to offer in a zombie apocalypse.