Every zombie fan worth his salt has had “The Discussion” on at least one occassion. That’s the one where you envision what steps you would take to evade death in the case of a zombie plague. Now it seems as if a group of people have taken the pervasive threat of the undead one step further. The Utne Reader reports on St. Louis’s Zombie Squad.

The group began with zombie-themed camping trips among a handful of friends and has grown into a national survivalist coalition with 175 members and hundreds of fans. Not surprisingly, many in the group are young, hip, and zombie-obsessed, but not all were looking to become survivalists. Westhoff notes that “attendees probably come to the Zombie Squad seminar expecting an in-depth discussion of the monstrous antagonists of Resident Evil and Night of the Living Dead. But they stay interested in what [squad member Christopher] Barnhart has to say long after the discussion strays from zombies.”

The article delves even further into how the zombie scenario and a distrust of the government’s effectiveness during a crisis have comingled to create an international group of nerd survivalists, taking the skills they’ve learned for a fictional disaster and applying them to real world concerns.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Zombies, Real World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.