Bert's Bad Idea

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Killing zombies can be a creative and enjoyable experience. Most recently, our group has erred on the side of sheer efficiency. You may have heard about the “Spinners”. I will tell you, however, that not all ideas are good, and the problem with having a bad idea when killing zombies is that the situation normally goes South quite quickly. There was this guy in the group named Bert. Bert was an old-timer and liked to tinker around. He was always muttering about “working smart”. Bert was handy to have around, but at his age, athletics just wasn't his thing. But Bert always wanted to try to keep up with the youngsters. The area in which he fell behind the worst was zombie killing. The guy just couldn’t swing a bat, and he’d get dizzy spells, so he had to stay away from heights. So Bert came up with this idea where he could just leisurely walk around and cut up zombies as they came at him. His idea was a bit like a snow blower. Not the auger part, so much, but the idea that you can just walk around guiding a machine that cuts them up. So picture this; you take a pair of wheels from wheelbarrows and you put them together. Then you have a support pipe that comes out the top. On that pipe sits your engine. Bert actually used a snow blower engine, for what it’s worth. Now here’s the tricky part…. Bert basically made a semi-circle of chain saw chains. The idea was that he could walk around with the chainsaw chain moving. It was all supported on the two wheels, so it could it was maneuverable, and the semi-circle meant the only way in was from behind, but not a big area, so it wasn’t likely that they’d be able to just move right in.

After he built it we did some testing and things seemed to go okay. We released just one zombie at first. Then we upped the ante with two and three. Around the numbers of five to seven things started to get a little dicey. Keep in mind that our test area was inside a building, so the floors were smooth and debris-free. The field of vision was perfect and the number and direction was controlled. The zombies would run right into it and get cut up, but it was slow going. They’d get cut up, but it slowed the chain a bit. I was concerned that it would stop altogether if he got mobbed. When we got to five the pieces laying on the ground and the blood really made it hard for Bert to maneuver. I suggested that maybe he make the wheels powered also, but he said he really couldn’t go any bigger with the engine, and that’s what it would take.

Against the better judgment of a lot of folks, Bert did a live-trial. He took out about ten before his wheels got stuck and he had to bail. Later, he did a few other trials with about the same results, and he ended up changing his wheels. The wheel change helped his mobility quite a bit, and he put on some better handles and a foot-kick for when he needed that extra “umphf” to move it. It was about his sixth trial when he ran into some bad luck. He turned a corner to a mass of zombies that hadn’t been there the day before. There must have been fifty. To Bert’s credit, he made a good showing. He probably took out twenty, but at that point there was so much blood and splatter and so many limbs laying about that he got stuck. So he’s stuck in place and all of these zombies are bearing down on him. He was relatively safe behind his chainsaw wall, but he couldn’t move and the mob just sort of enveloped him. In the end he got pinned under his own invention. We think it was the weight of the thing that actually killed him. The mob ended up pushing it over on him. They couldn't even really get to him at that point, but he was an old man, and he just couldn't take it.

I’m not sure what the lesson here is. Maybe “go with your gut”, or “pride comes before a fall”. I’m not sure. I am sure of one thing. A snow-blower style chainsaw zombie-killer mounted on two wheels just doesn’t hold up to real-life applications, and Bert found that out the hard way.