Dr Dale's Zombie Dictionary: The A-Z Guide to Staying Alive - By Dale Seslick Page 0,3

and hope to pierce an attacking zombie’s skull.Or if you had a lot of peanuts you could drop them on the zombie, thus crushing him. Or if you dropped a peanut from the top of the Empire State building it could reach the velocity of a bullet and smash the zombie’s brain… Or you could just use an axe.

ALTRUISM

Ah, good. I was hoping that there would be an A word that would cover this subject of selflessness and helping others. That way I wouldn’t have to wait too long before teaching you the best way to behave during a zombie apocalypse – being altruistic isn’t it.

When the undead rise you must become the most selfish, self-absorbed, egotistical person EVER. Survival (and this may come as a shock to some of you) is about surviving and you’re only going to do that if you completely and unequivocally look after number one. And if I need to make this any clearer – the number one I am talking about is YOU.

Do not give your food away to anyone unless you are getting something useful in return – even if they are dying of hunger. By giving your supplies to them you only delay the inevitable death of both of you.

Do not give your weapons away to anyone unless you get something useful in return. You will learn from this book that anything can be utilised as a weapon so if someone is useless enough to have found nothing to use as a weapon it will be a waste of time giving them your valuable items.

Do not let anyone into your safe house – even if you know, love and cherish them. Who’s to say they haven’t been bitten or infected? Even a loved one will lie to you in order to aid their own survival.

Lie, cheat and steal to get what you want. Even consider murder as a viable option. As the apocalypse rages on, resources will become scarcer and it willbecome a dog-eat-dog world. Make sure you are the biggest dog in the kennel otherwise you will be left with nothing.

This may all seem a little harsh and if you are a mild-mannered person of essentially quite a British upbringing it will be a difficult adjustment. Trust me, though. If you do not adopt this attitude you will fail in your quest for survival. You will learn to live with the guilt.

ANIMALS

One of the most frequently asked questions by anyone attending my seminars is ‘Dr Dale, can I have your telephone ber?’, the answer to which greatly depends on how attractive and affluent the questioner is.

One of the second most frequently asked questions is ‘Can animals become zombies?’ As we have yet to experience the apocalypse, and so are unaware of what form of outbreak we will encounter, it would be remiss of me to give a definitive answer.

However, research at the School of Survival states that it would be highly unlikely for us to come face to face with a zombie hamster (not only because hamsters are so small and would have to be perched on a bookcase, or a child’s head, in order to come face to face with you).

The deductive reasoning behind this is as follows: The most likely cause of a zombie outbreak is through experimentation gone wrong. The experimentation would have to be carried out on humans in order to be transmitted to humans in order to create a zombie apocalypse. The fact that the experiment was so complex that it could reanimate a human corpse and could only be destroyed by eliminating the brain would mean that it would be a very specific experiment unlikely to cross-pollinate to other species with different genetic make-up and biology. Ergo, the zombie virus would not transmit to animals.

Of course, science is never an exact science and you may be thinking that if diseases like swine flu, bird flu and mad cow disease can pass from animals to humans, then it’s safe to assume that no matter how specific the disease, it could still mutate and transfer from humans to animals. To further substantiate that particular theory, we have had some small success in the School of Survival in proving that animals will suffer from human diseases, and thus far have managed to give a goldfish Alzheimer’s, a duck chickenpox, a chicken duckpox and a kangaroo gonorrhoea.

Bear in mind that both humans and animals can be equally affected by rabies, which is the closest to a zombie virus. In