How to Beat the SMART ZOMBIES in ALONE

If virals from Dying Light trapped you inside your urban apartment building alone, what would you do? Zombies are supposed to be mindless killing machines. They can’t think, can’t strategize, and can’t lure you out of your safe house to eat you alive. Unfortunately for Aidan, who’s trapped, lonely, and terrified of going outside to hunt for supplies, the zombies lurking in his apartment complex CAN think, they CAN strategize and they absolutely WILL try to lure you outside or crawl up the balcon

ies to get you. Let’s see if we can outsmart them. I’m going to break down the mistakes made by our lonely survivor, see if we can make better decisions and ultimately attempt to beat the SMART ZOMBIES in ALONE. Bearded Aidan tells us it’s day 42 of a zombie outbreak and lets us know how things are going by tying a noose around his neck. We cut back 42 days to meet pre-Zed Aidan, a loft dwelling trust fund baby who hangs surfboards on his walls and wakes up with a new girl every morning. His lat

est one night stand doesn’t seem thrilled to see him and bolts before he’s even woken up. By the time he gets downstairs, he’s slept through the apocalypse. Sounds of screaming and sirens only seem to register when he turns on his TV and sees an emergency warning system by the Office of Civil Defense. From his balcony, he gets a front seat view to the end of the world. Across the way, a neighbor slams through his glass patio door. Overhead, a fiery helicopter crashes into a nearby building. Down

below in the courtyard, a torrent of people flood out of the building, passing a young girl calling out for help. Aidan yells that he’s coming to help her…but she lunges for an old lady who got there first. She and another infected tear the old lady to shreds. Aidan might have been asleep when the world ended, but he should be wide awake now. The vague emergency broadcast warning coupled with screaming and sounds of explosions outside means the threat is not only real but very close to us. Witn

essing an attack just a few feet below us should confirm our suspicions. Our options here are to stay or to flee. Leaving the city is a solid strategy for any crisis, but it’s going to be pretty tough to do in a place like Los Angeles. LA extends for 44 miles (71 km) from north to south and for 29 miles (47 km) from east to west…and that’s just the actual city of Los Angeles. The megacity of Greater Los Angeles covers an area of 2,281 square miles (5,910 square km). On an UNCROWDED day, it can t

ake an hour to reach the Los Angeles city limits. The problem here is that the city is a maze, and it’s not even the first maze we’ll have to traverse to get out of here. Our apartment complex is a maze too, full of people running for their lives as well as zombies, of which we can’t discern between, all blocking our way to the stairs, down to the parking garage, to our car. Even if we can reach the car, do we have enough gas to make it through the traffic jams blocking the roads? Do we have a m

ap or a fall back location? To even attempt an evacuation, we should have a bug out bag ready, stocked with a 9mm glock, one of the most common and reliable handguns in the United States, as well as ammo, water, a first aid kit, a paper map, flashlights and a few MREs or replacement bars. Even then we should still grab a second and third weapon that don’t require ammo, in case we’re forced to abandon our car on the road and seek shelter elsewhere. With everyone fleeing the city like rats on a si

nking ship, staying put in our apartment and waiting it out is likely the safest choice for most of us. We’re not Jason Bourne, so transforming our apartment into our safe house is priority number one. Aidan tumbles back inside his apartment. His front door opens and his neighbor Brandon suddenly rushes in. He tells Aidan something’s happening, that his roommate attacked him. He seems to have a cut on the back of his neck and rushes to the bathroom moaning. Aidan grabs a kitchen knife. The tv em

ergency warning stops as a reporter appears and says the infected are dangerous, screaming, bleeding from the eyes and biting and scratching people. The virus seems to be passed through the blood. Halfway through telling Aidan he isn’t infected, Brandon’s eyes suddenly begin to bleed and boils appear on his face. Aidan tells him to leave and Brandon has just enough mental clarity to get out the front door before he turns into a zombie and kills Aidan. Brandon is immediately swarmed. Aidan barely

gets the door locked and watches through the peephole as zombies tear into Brandon. Aidan is insanely lucky that Brandon hadn’t fully turned before entering his apartment. He’s also lucky Brandon was coherent enough and WILLING to leave. Like I told you in The Night Eats the World, your door closing game needs to be SUPER tight, and in the real world Aidan wouldn’t get any more second chances after leaving the door unlocked like this. Your first step is to secure your door, by locking it, then

barricading it. A fridge is okay, but you’re sacrificing your perishable food for an ineffective obstacle. This door opens inward, so a dining chair firmly wedged under the handle and against the floor OR under the handle and against the wall so that the wall or floor can act as a secondary brace, should be the first strategy. Then, heavier objects can be used to reinforce it. The other option is to use something wider than the door as a drop bar across the door. A piece of wood from a bookshelf

or his metal curtain rod from the shower would work. Yes, drilling or banging makeshift brackets into the walls to either side of the door would be noisy, but only for a moment and zombies would eventually get distracted by something else. Once the door is secured, Aidan should go into the bathroom and kitchen and fill the tub, sinks and any other containers he has with water. We learn later he has tons of water bottles – that’s great. Rely on the tap first and keep the bottles on reserve in ca

se the utilities shut off, then put buckets out on the balcony to catch rainwater. If you don’t have a reserve of evian in your apartment, the next best option is to create a solar still, like I showed you in Sweetheart. You can also siphon water from the toilet tank as well as your apartment water heater. After the water, Aidan needs to plug in all of his valuable electronics and charge them fully, keeping them charged until the electricity shuts off, at which point he should turn off his elect

ronics to save for emergencies, like we talked about in The Night Eats the World. He can use his phone to call family as well as emergency numbers like 911 or even the CDC. This epidemic seems to have started overnight and nearby. They’re probably busy, but that’s not really the point – the point is to use tools at your disposal while they’re still available to gather information you might need. I would also argue that if Aidan has a printer, he should get on his computer and begin printing off

important information, like a local area street map in case we need to forage for supplies later, or instructions for how to build a solar still or how to urban hunt for birds. Aidan should also take quick stock of his fridge and pantry, to know what he has and what he doesn’t. Hell, if he has things like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers or potatoes, he could go online and print out quick patio growing guides just in case things get that dire. Sure, supply runs will eventually be a necessity, but ha

ving the information on hand to start a food garden can’t hurt. Aidan could also grab a piece of paper and write SURVIVOR INSIDE on it, then slide that under the front door, so anyone still alive moving through the building would know he was there. He could even include a code phrase the zombies wouldn’t be able to say like “the mississippi might melt” so he knows to open the door if he hears it. Traumatized that his first world problems have become World War Z problems, Aidan starts drinking an

d tries drunk dialing people. No one picks up. He realizes he has unread texts from his parents saying they’re coming to get him and his sister. When they can’t reach him, they tell him to stay alive and protect his sister. By day 6, the news is still operating, keeping people updated and warning them to ration food and water. Aidan moves his bed downstairs and barricades the front door with his refrigerator. Aidan records a video log while listening to other survivors get chased by zombies thro

ugh the halls outside. By day 19, the news tells Aidan that the zombie’s reptilian brain is forcing them to attack the uninfected. She says they’re still aware of their actions, but can’t help it. On another video log, Aidan worries about having to go out for supplies. Water has stopped running, but electricity still works. He tells us that in periods of sensory deprivation, people will start to hallucinate. He mimes guitar and breaks a mirror with a bat. Unlike Sam in The Night Eats the World,

Aidan is an extrovert and ill prepared to entertain himself alone in his apartment. I can hear every introvert viewer laughing now – 19 days of isolation are nothing, they’re rookie numbers and he’s gonna have to pump those up. Also, at this point, the phones are still working – he might not be able to reach his family, but he should be able to call literally anybody else. Time to reconnect with those facebook friends you’ve been avoiding. After, he SHOULD be worried about what this CDC doctor o

n TV is telling him. These AREN’T normal zombies. This zombie virus is puppeting people, like they’re trapped inside a Pacific Rim jaeger with the kill switch permanently turned on. They can see what they’re doing and are begging themselves not to hurt anyone, but can’t stop themselves. That jacks the danger level up considerably and we have to incorporate it into our survival strategies better than Aidan does. We’ll need to start testing the zombies limitations, to prep for supply runs and even

tually clearing the building. This might mean they can problem solve around traps we set OR it might even mean they can be reasoned with or mimicked in a useful way. As an aside, don’t break your mirrors. They can be used to signal others at far distances and to peer around corners, which will become very useful when we have to start supply runs. We can also use that light trick from The Mummy to light our apartment when the electricity stops working. A sound coming from the bathroom surprises A

idan. A zombie emerges and Aidan hides behind a surfboard. When the zombie’s back is turned, he stalks closer with his bat and K.O.s her before she can attack him. Aidan drops her body off his balcony and goes into the bathroom. He discovers she crawled into his apartment through the ventilation system and barricades the hatch with his surfboard. Thank god Aidan seems to be about as complex as a piece of toast, otherwise a zombie problem solving its way through the ventilation system to get to h

im might really scare him. This should have him reaching for his brown pants. Think about it – either she was in an apartment, found the vent, crawled inside, and followed his sounds until she fell into his apartment OR she crawled into the vents as a human, turned, and then crawled around until she heard him and dropped in to say hello. So either, she formed a plan of attack OR the vents are probably full of zombies. That’s some 7 days to die horde night stuff. Hiding to get the jump on her was

a great idea, but he should have double tapped her the second she hit the floor, then retrieved a kitchen knife and put it through her eye just to be safe. Using the surfboard to block the vent is a good idea in a pinch, but he should replace it with the metal shower rod – the edges are sharper and less likely to slip out of place like the surfboard is. Even better if we have wood and nails to board up the opening, but that would prevent us from using the vents later if we needed to. On day 41,

Aidan tells us he’s losing his mind. He knows he’s too cowardly to open his own front door, so starvation is inevitable. He hears a beep from his phone and listens to a voicemail from his parents. His mom tells him that his sister got out of town before things imploded and went to their cabin. His parents got trapped at their office. He listens as a zombie breaks into the room they’re in. Aidan grabs his bat and steps out into the hall. He finds Brandon crawling around with bites all over his b

ody and is suddenly swarmed by zombies. He bolts down the hall, dodging zombies like an NFL scout is in the audience. He misses his own apartment door and bounds into the stairwell to the next floor down. He dodges and weaves until he reaches another set of stairs and barely makes it back into his own apartment. Two zombies know he’s in there and one barks at him to “Come here” while trying to bang the door down. Finally, electricity across the city gives out. With supplies dwindling and emotion

s raging, Aidan needs to calm himself and strategize before he gets himself killed. That’s all this excursion into the hall is good for – it’s a good way to die. Aidan doesn’t need to go out into the halls at all, at least not yet. Instead, he should use the balconies on the outside of the building to move from apartment to apartment. This would let him clear one apartment at a time. The safest way to do this would be to use a spoon against the railing of each balcony, luring the zombies out so

they either dive over the balcony in search of the noise OR so he can bludgeon them with the bat or stab them with his knife. Or he could avoid the apartments that have zombies in them altogether. Many apartment Buildings in the United States are required to have self closing doors on each floor, so that they can close in the event of a fire and potentially contain it to a single apartment or building level. This means that Aidan COULD try to clear the hallway of the top floor of his building be

fore venturing out. Then he could shut the doors to this level and clear the other apartments one by one using our old “hole in the door, stab zombies that come to the hole” trick. To clear the hallway, it’s time to start experimenting. Personally, I would create a sound trap and toss it down into the courtyard AWAY from the building. This would hopefully compel the zombies in the upper floors to throw themselves out of windows and off balconies in search of that noise. To create the sound trap,

you could use either an ipod, voice recorder, or your phone to record a message in your own voice, then tape it to a couch cushion to soften its fall. Ideally, once the message ended, the zombies would forget to return to the building altogether. We’ve returned to the open. It’s day 42, Aidan prepares to end it all, when he notices a girl still alive in another apartment across the courtyard and one floor below his. He falls off the chair, choking for a moment before the rope snaps and he crash

es to the ground. In his last video blog, he tells us his battery is about to die and he’s off to go find the girl he saw. He says he’s “almost sure she’s real.” On Day 43, Aidan steps out onto his balcony and gets spooked back inside by a Zed. The girl suddenly opens her curtains and spots him. Using paper signs, he tells her his name is Aidan. She writes back that her name is Eva. They let each other know their situation. She has food but no water. He gives her a partial lie. He says he has to

ns of bottled water, which appears to be true although we never see it, but he lies and tells her he still has food. Zombies on her level force them to cut the conversation short but they agree to chat tomorrow. At night, it rains. Aidan catches it in pots and showers in it. Eva sneaks a peek. On day 44, Aidan goes outside to chat with Eva. He asks what happened. She tells him zombies were scratching on her walls. He asks her if she has a baseball glove. She pulls out a lacrosse stick. Aidan tie

s a baseball to a rope and sends it over to her. She ties the rope to her balcony and Aidan sends across four bottles of water on hangers. Suddenly a business zombie sees Eva. He begins leaping up the building from balcony to balcony to reach her. Aidan throws something, pulling the zed’s attention. The business zombie starts his climb to Aidan. Meanwhile, the zombie at his door begins banging harder. The business zombie reaches Aidan’s balcony and bangs his head against Aidan’s window until it

shatters, knocking the zombie down. Aidan steps outside and beats him to death with his bat. Setting goals for yourself is a useful everyday survival strategy, and probably even more useful in a zombie apocalypse. Doubly here, because Aidan and Eva discover they’re both alone and there’s strength in numbers…usually. The supply rope between their apartments is a solid way to get her water, but it only allows for moving supplies downhill to her apartment. Instead, I would have had Eva wrap the cor

d around the railing and then toss the ball back to me so I could create a rope circle pulley system and we could pass things back and forth rather than just one way. To prevent the wind or a sudden imbalance from knocking supplies off course, I would have also bent the metal hook of the hangars in a tighter circle around the rope so it couldn’t slide off. As for the parkouring zombie, instead of panicking, both of them should have weapons ready to stab him in the face or knock him off the build

ing when he reaches their level. The fact that the zombie redirects to Aidan because Aidan is making more noise and Eva hides out of view shows that the zombie seems to have a very instinctive, toddler-level sense of object permanence. Simply ducking out of sight when he reached the ground again may have confused him enough to back off. Aidan strategizes with himself. He wants to reach Eva, but every door is locked and there are zombies everywhere. He realizes something and rushes out into the h

all to find Brandon’s corpse. He loots it for his keys. Suddenly a band of zombies wanders by. Aidan drops to the floor beside Brandon and pretends to be dead. The zombies stumble away just long enough to let Aidan reach Brandon’s apartment and let himself inside. Inside Brandon’s apartment, Aidan follows blood on the walls to a bedroom where he finds Brandon’s roommate laying on the bed. He tosses a helmet at her and she doesn’t stir. He loots the kitchen for peanut butter and stale chips. Turn

s out, Aidan is the luckiest neighbor in the world – Brandon was a climber. There are ropes and carabiners everywhere. Under the bed, he finds an ice pick. Suddenly, Brandon’s OTHER roommate charges out of the darkness. Aidan gets knocked against the wall and kicks the zombie back before narrowly grabbing the pick ax. The roommate attempts to bite down, but Aidan spikes him in the back, killing him. From the bed, he hears Brandon’s female roommate begging for him to “help her” so he mercy kills

her too. Instead of attempting another run on the hallway he knows is full of zeds, Aidan should have considered going over the balcony first. Brandon told him there was at least one zombie in his apartment, and a one-on-one fight on the balcony is going to be much more doable than rushing through a hallway horde to fight in a tiny dark bedroom like this. Playing Dead was a panic move and he’s lucky it worked, but I wouldn’t want to depend on it unless I was desperate as it’s difficult to fight

or flee from this prone position. Once inside Brandon’s apartment, Aidan needs to remember the golden rule of zombie playthroughs – every room contains a zombie until we know it doesn’t. He should move through this apartment, clearing it room by room, before looking for anything else. To clear it, he should have brought a large fragment from the mirror he broke, tied to a bent piece of metal or a ladle so he could look around corners before entering rooms. He could even close all doors he comes

to, then clear the main open area first before returning to clear each room individually. The point is simply to work smarter, not harder, and Jason Bourne your way to survival, using everything at your disposal. And when Aidan finds the unresponsive body on the bed, he should double tap her with a stab to the head immediately just to make sure. Aidan rushes to the door, then into the hall. The zombies have gathered nearby in the darkness. He silently closes the door, only to find the zombie pla

guing his door still there. He barely sneaks back into his apartment undetected. He inventories Brandon’s climbing bag and finds two walkie talkies that still have battery, but wonders how he’s going to get one to Eva. Aidan straps on his backpack and bat and ties pieces of fabric into a long prisoner’s rope, which he tosses off the balcony. He climbs down to the courtyard, narrowly dodging a horde of zeds as they chase sounds around the building. He tosses a bundle containing one walkie talkie

up to her balcony, then darts back across and hides in a first floor balcony just long enough for the zombies to dart away again before climbing back up. This is pure movie nonsense. The entire point of connecting their apartments via the supply rope was to pass things like this between each other safely. Even if he was worried the walkie talkie would break, the better option here would be to toss it to her so she could catch it like the baseball OR stuff it into a couch pillow and toss that acr

oss for extra cushion. He has the high ground and decent aim – there was no reason to risk the climb down. If Aidan wants to do all his thinking with his little brain, the better option would still have been to wait for Eva to wake up, tell her to make a bed sheet rope on her end, then send across supplies via the cord bridge AND THEN climb down to climb up the sheet rope to her apartment on the other side. Let’s be honest, he’s on the top floor of this building. The solution to all of this is s

imply to build a ladder from his balcony to the roof and walk around to the balcony above hers, before letting himself down one floor to join her in her apartment. It’s Day 45. Eva and Aidan distract each other for a while over the walkie talkies with banter and flirting, but night descends soon enough. Aidan removes the surfboard blocking the ventilation system and crawls inside. He smells death and finds a dead zombified body down a side tunnel. He crawls to the next apartment and drops into t

he bathroom. He notices blood on the bathtub, but there’s nothing inside. He plunges deeper into the apartment and searches each room about as thoroughly as a babysitter that just wants to go watch tv. In the kitchen, he notices a fridge barricading the door and opens the cabinets to find them stockpiled with every preserved food known to man, including twinkies. He rushes to tell Eva about his find, but she berates him for disappearing without telling her. She tells him she’s terrified to be al

one again and he should have told her he was out of food. She says she’s fashioned a rope out of bedsheets like his and wants to comes across to his side. The topic shifts and she double checks that he’s safe to talk to her. He tells her everything’s fine, that the apartment is barricaded. She points that the fridge against the door means someone else is in the apartment with him. She tells him to run, he won’t without the food. Aidan notices a hole in the apartment wall and turns to find Edward

standing in the kitchen with a macgyvered spear made from a broom, two knives, a metal bar and duct tape. Edward lowers his spear and tells him it isn’t his apartment. He dug through the wall looking for food. Edward tells Aidan he heard him talking and asks who he was talking to. Aidan lies and says himself. Aidan asks about the guy who lived here and Edward tells him the guy killed himself. He wrapped the body and tossed it out in the hall. They talk about life and relationships, and encourag

es Aidan to take the booze left in the cabinet. When his back is turned, Edward knocks Aidan unconscious with his own bat. Aidan wakes tied to a bed with Lucy the Zombie reaching for him on the bed, begging him to kill her. Edward tells Aidan, he’s going to drug him and feed him to her to keep her alive. Aidan tells Edward Lucy wants to die and begs for his life, but Edward can’t be convinced. Eva calls for help distracting Edward. When Edward returns, Aidan tosses him at Lucy who rips out the b

ack of his neck. Going through the vents would have allowed Aidan to avoid needing to use the hallways at all. To protect himself along the way, he should have either worn leather or blue denim on his arms to protect against bites and carried a kitchen knife to use on anything alive or undead up there. A knife would also have been small enough to keep on himself tucked away so that he couldn’t become separated from his weapon like he ultimately does in the kitchen. While dropping down into the a

partment should have made enough noise to draw attention from any zeds, before dropping down he should have banged on the ceiling for a bit to draw any zombies to him so he could use the vent opening as a murder hole and easily dispatch them. Even after doing that, he should move through clearing rooms one by one – then he would have noticed this glaring hole in the wall in the back bedroom and he might have taken more notice of the fridge blocking the front door. As for Edward, Aidan’s not in t

he right frame of mind to imagine an old guy setting a trap like this one, but he should have had a second weapon on him just in case. Of course, Edward ambushes him with the headshot so it’s likely Edward would have taken his knife anyway. Once captured, Aidan really only has two options here. The first is to keep Edward monologuing long enough to cut through his restraints under the bed. In a pinch, he could have kept Ed going by asking about his and Lucy’s love story. The other option is to g

oing along with Edward, convince him to give him the pills, then Aidan could wait until he’s within reach to use his legs and knock Edward off balance or even off his feet entirely. Aidan grabs his pack when Eva tells him via walkie talkie that the zombies have broken into her apartment. He rushes out of Edward’s apartment. His own apartment door is locked, forcing him back into Brandon’s. He leaps the eight feet across to his own balcony, deploys his sheet rope and slips down to the courtyard,

landing hard on a patio chair. A zombie comes for him. Aidan isn’t able to get the bat out of his backpack. Luckily, there happens to be a loaded 12 gauge laying nearby. He kills two zombies, drawing the attention of the whole apartment complex. Zombies begin leaping from balconies. He rushes up Eva’s side of the building. She lets down her own sheet rope, and Aidan climbs up. A zombie latches on and climbs after him. He uses a pocket knife to cut the sheet and the zombie falls. Aidan tells Eva

to climb down one story. Once united, they run for the door, only for two zombies to come barreling inside. They rush out, narrowly reaching the stairs. Aidan breaks his bat breaking off the doorknob. They make it around to another level and Aidan tells her how to get to his apartment. They open the door, and zombies pin Aidan to the wall. They manage to get one off him, but another sends him tumbling down the stairs. As the zombie bites down on him, Eva ice picks the zombie in the back. The pai

r race through hallway after hallway, tossing zombies aside until they reach his apartment. Eva gets inside just as Aidan is tackled by the zombie stalking his apartment. The door closes on both men and Eva’s left to fear the worst. Suddenly, Aidan appears, but he won’t let her come near him. He rushes to the balcony prepared to throw himself off if he’s infected. He tells her to crawl through the vents to the neighbor’s apartment where there’s plenty of food to wait for the zeds to expire. He s

trips away his clothing – we see a bloody bite mark on his shirt. But when he finally tears off the last layer, there’s no bite. As they hear the zombie pounding at the door, they slam their bodies into the fridge to keep it in place and we leave them to a doomed albeit romantic unknown ending. Well, Aidan’s plot armor is so thick, it’s no wonder he never fashions any actual bite resistant armor for himself. He’s lucky he came across a working, loaded shotgun, for all the good having his bat wit

h him did. Unfortunately for Aidan and Eva, Aidan has the survival skills of a love struck teenager being initiated into a death cult and it’s likely he’s dead within a matter of weeks anyway. But with luck on his side, I give him a survivor score of 2.5/5. Maybe with someone to live for, he’ll finally start using his big head for a change. As for Eva, she is a total unknown and I like to think right after the movie ended she shanked Aidan and took all his stuff. Without proof, though, I’m gonna

give her a survivor score of 2/5. There were several ways Aidan could have methodically cleared and secured the top floor of the building, making it easy to scavenge for supplies and eventually rescue Eva. He could have exclusively used the balconies to clear out apartments one by one OR he could have simply fashioned a ladder to the roof and united with her in about an hour. Despite reuniting, I think it’s safe to say they Romeo and Julieted shortly after the ending when their food and water r

an out or the zombies eventually broke into their Alamo and ate them. All in all, I think the SMART ZOMBIES from ALONE were UNBEATEN. Moral of the story… You have no chance if you live in a large city when the zombie apocalypse pops off. And don’t miss my next video where we need to find a way to permanently put down two gigantic hard to kill hillbillies before they drag us back to their basement for dinner. Watch this to see why we wouldn’t survive a full blown zombie armageddon. Or, let YouTub

e determine your fate.