AMC’s The Walking Dead is back for its sixth season this weekend. If you’re like me, this means you’ll be spending your Sunday evenings gaming out intricate zombie survival scenarios in your own life: Would my home withstand a zombie invasion? How quickly would my town survive? Which of my dopey neighbors would be the first to get bit?
As a public service to others similarly zombie-obsessed, I’ve created a county-level index of survivability that answers the following question: How likely am I to survive a zombie apocalypse based on where I live? The index assumes that if you want to survive a zombie onslaught, you should live in a place that has the following characteristics:
- Low population density (less people = less zombies)
- Access to guns (self-explanatory, to be honest)
- People with military experience (veterans!)
- Terrain that’s difficult for zombies to traverse (when’s the last time you saw one scale a cliff?)
- Access to bodies of water (zombies can’t swim, and you need water to survive)