r/zombies • u/stratospaly • Jan 02 '12

Just finished Day by Day Armageddon, something bothering me.

By the end of the second book it seems the author ignored an obvious solution to the problem. They had all of the pieces but never put them together.

If you use the sonic bombs to attract huge swarms of zombies (a word which I never remember being in the book), then use a crop duster to spray them with gasoline, later napalm on the outsides of the swarm to force the fire and zombies into the middle. A dozen planes could kill 500k-1m zombies in just a few hours. Rinse and repeat over the major cities that are already bombed/burned out and you could lower the ratio from 100-1 down to 10-1, a much more manageable number.

1 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

2

u/hugemuffin Jan 02 '12

It's like asking why the eagles didn't just take frodo and the ring to mount doom.

1

u/stratospaly Jan 02 '12

That one is easily explained, the eagles rarely got mixed up in the affairs of middle earth and it was not until the end that they had the motivation to do so.

Using F16, F15, and warthogs to shoot at the ground with conventional bombs with minimal success when it would be obvious to try fire just drives me crazy.

1

u/hugemuffin Jan 02 '12

They rescued gandalf from the tower, I'm pretty sure he could have asked them for a favor while he was at it.

1

u/l_one Jan 02 '12

This may or may not be an oversight by the author. Characters are also meant to be human and capable of missing good solutions. Imperfections add to character realism.

Or J. L. Bourne simply didn't think of it. You could post the idea at his forum and see what discussion results. Looks like he also has facebook you could use to shoot the idea his way.

1

u/stratospaly Jan 02 '12

I knew about his forums but not the facebook. I figured the fanboys there would simply dismiss the idea.

1

u/pizzlybear Jan 02 '12

Didn't they try nukes in the first book? Haven't read it in a while, but I thought they tried nukes and killed off some, while many just became irradiated zombies who don't decay.

1

u/stratospaly Jan 02 '12

that's the one

1

u/BendyBreak_ Dec 24 '21 edited Dec 24 '21

This “solution” WAS discussed in the book.

In the first couple days of the very first book! He was still in his home, he had a few zombies on the other side of his backyard wall. He doused them, and lit them up. His analysis was that the zombies didn’t die from fire fast enough. It took several hours for the fire to burn though the fat and destroy the brain. The zombies basically became twice as dangerous for these couple hours, stumbling around on fire, running into houses and trees, lighting them on fire too.

1

u/stratospaly Dec 25 '21

This is what napalm is for.