The Back Alley Archives

See, that’s what’s sad about all this: the post-disaster world will be just like this one, only worse. All the lousy coworkers and squabbles and crap, but none of the luxuries. The winners won’t be the zombies, just another set of bosses. The end of the world is what you call it when your tribe loses. It may be the end of the world for them, like it was for hundreds of native tribes all over the world, but when your world ends like that, you don’t get to play out the game in some cool ruins out of a video game. Some other tribe takes over, that’s all. And when they do, there’s no way on earth you can hole up in your townhouse with a semi-automatic weapon and hold out. Because it’s organization that wins, not lone gunmen. If you want to survive, join a club. It only looks like chaos to the losers. The Mongols are my classic example here. They were a “horde” to the people whose asses they kicked, but if those losers had had the sense to accept Mongol vassalage (which the Mongols usually offered before they started leveling everything to the horizon) they’d have found out that the Mongols were actually better organized than their opposition. Most of the time the Mongol armies faced armies made up of a few professional soldiers and huge peasant levies, led by guys who were born into the job. Half of them were opium addicts, retards, lazy whoremongers, or macho idiots. That’s what you get when you trust a family tree.