Perhaps after seeing my blog about a prison being a great place to hole up while humanity falls, a friend sent me this link. Apparently the Brompton Road Underground in London is for sale. For those who don’t know, the tube station became a command bunker during World War II and hasn’t experienced a human presence in about 60 years.
The platforms were bricked off, machinery was stripped from the lift shafts and floors were laid to create a stack of circular operations rooms, complete with large map tables where commanders could watch as waves of bombers swept over London during the Blitz.
The chambers, which reach 60 feet beneath London, were cleared out and locked up in the early 1950s when the Cold War and the threat of missile attack made the old air defences obsolete.
Sounds ideal on the surface (get it?) for sure. But just because a building is secure against one threat doesn’t mean it’s ideal for another. While it’s certainly better than most above-ground buildings, the problem with the tube station is that it’s not very economical. Zombies are subject to gravity, and so there is no amount of going down that will allow you to ultimately run from them. Instead, you’d need to buy a very solid, very secure doorways to the area below – the type of doorway that would make an above-ground building secure (barring any other nuisances like ground floor windows).
But the tube station and the door you’d need are very, very expensive. Compare that to a two story building without a staircase with a knotted bed sheet on the second floor that can be lowered and retracted. Zombies cannot fly, and so with the two story building you will have achieved even greater safety than the tube station for the price of a sledgehammer (for the stairs) and a bed sheet.
Live in the United States long enough and you’ll soon learn that throwing gobs and gobs of money at a problem isn’t always the best solution. When you’re surviving, resources are precious. The ones who make it after the coming plague will be the ones who appreciated efficiency – they will be the ones who got the most out of their resources.
You can start by not dropping £20 million on an underground bunker for less security than you could get for £100 at a hardware store.