I'm not talking organized rebels, just the odd LaMOE,[5] Last Man on Earth. There was always one or two in every town, some dude, or chick, who managed to survive. I read somewhere that the United States had the highest number of them in the world, something about our individualistic nature or something.
"I read somewhere" he says, like a liar. This is just… not true? By literally any measure, this isn't the case.
Anyway, "LaMOEs" - which is such a snivelling phrase for these people, by the way - just were not very common, sorry. Humans are not built to live alone under these conditions. They're effectively a fiction to explain the guerrilla war they found themselves fighting, because "Actually people are mad as hell we destroyed their government" doesn't fit when they are so committed to downplaying the prominence of their rival governments?
Even so far as they did exist, the largest number of them per capita was in Aotearoa, and the largest number
total was in Nigeria. On all counts this is a lie, Todd's such a prick.
By Todd's definition you're completely correct, there were basically zero "lamoes" worldwide, I guess barring the ultra-rare Siberian or Alaskan hermit who lived in such isolation they might not have known anything was happening anyway. Todd, of course, is presenting a biased or simply ignorant view for one reason or another. Because of course there was hardly anyone around who lived, totally alone, in some isolated safe house or prepper bunker or whatever the hell
and also had no damn idea anyone else was still alive. Because most of these people were the type to have anticipated an impending Apocalypse and had their secure location ready ahead of time, they tended to be equipped with a miraculous piece of technology known as a 'ham radio', and were entirely capable of communicating with the rest of the world, which was - as our intrepid interviewer has himself shown - absolutely flooding the world's airwaves at every moment of every day. The circumstances needed to have someone able to keep themselves alive for years, alone, but at no point scavenge any sort of working radio (Even a commercial receiver-only one was fine! There were info broadcasts all the time!) was so vanishingly rare as to be basically impossible. And as you allude to, humans aren't built for that kind of isolation. Even the most pessimistic isolated survivors would succumb to the need for hope and try to find a working radio.
Plus, as has
also already been established by our man, despite everything the skies were not exactly empty of our technology in these years. Sure, some folks were stuck underground or indoors, but anyone able to look outside would stand a good chance of spotting an aircraft if they watched for awhile.
Even more than that though is that Todd omits discussion of the far more common dynamic of small survivor groups entirely. Someone all alone faces too many dangers to stand much chance. A small group, five or six at most, is another matter. Plenty of these, be they family units, friend groups, or randos thrown together by circumstance, managed to establish tiny locations where they survived until they could escape or be rescued. These had their own problems of course, and more than one fell apart to infighting or did some heinous shit like exiling folks over petty concerns. But the ability to sleep with someone else on watch, to specialize slightly so that one person can be a mechanic while another tends a farm plot, the simple expedience of having someone stand guard while you reinforce a fence - quite aside from the psychological issues of isolation, small groups fared far better than individuals.
At least the guys down south knew that once they swept an area, it stayed swept. They didn't have to worry about rear area attacks like us. We swept every area at least three times. We used everything from ramrods and sniffer Ks to high-tech ground radar. Over and over again, and all of this in the dead of winter. We lost more guys to frostbite than to anything else. And still, every spring, you knew, you just knew…it'd be like, "oh shit, here we go again." I mean, even today, with all the sweeps and civilian volunteer groups, spring's like winter used to be, nature letting us know the good life's over for now.
This is an
incredibly funny, in a twisted way, thing to say about AG South's experiences with zack. Yes, in the Southwest and much of Texas it was true; unless someone fucked up and left a basement uncleared or something, things were just peachy in that regard. It uh... boy, did it not hold true once they reached the bayous. Once they got to eastern Texas and Louisiana they were up shit creek, especially because of the full-scale war they were also fighting with the CSA. It's not like it's difficult to find all kinds of reports, statements, interviews, about some poor dumb bastard infantryman who had spent days with his squad picking through the wetlands, with zombies potentially lurking anywhere down there, only to suddenly get got from behind by a swampy zed.
See, in places like that, you have two problems that combine into a mega shitshow. First, it's simply not possible to properly check everything. You often don't get a remotely clear view of the bottom and doing it with sticks? Hahahaha okay, the Mississippi Delta is like three million square kilometers.
The second problem is what really shits everything up though. The first issue would be a problem, but a surmountable one, except that in places like that zombies turn into ultra bastards. They love to fall over in places like that, and sometimes they can't, or don't want to, get back up in a timely fashion. They just lie there face down on the bottom of a pool of stagnant water. In time they'll get covered to some extent by silt and whatnot, and their sense organs will be damaged by the constant water, and sounds etc will be muffled under there anyway. They still possess that creepy ability to know when food is around but without their other senses they often don't respond in a timely fashion to disturbances. They take longer to realize the living are traipsing around, and they usually have to take a good amount of time pulling themselves free of mud and plant growth and the like. All of which means it's very easy for someone, even someone being careful and with training and equipment, to pass by a submerged zed by just a few feet only for that rotting dude to haul his ass up out of the water minutes, hours, even days later.
So sure, they didn't have to reckon with the problem of hidden frozen zombies springing back to unlife, but they had their own problems down there.
