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This chapter presents the awful moral dilemma of the zombie epidemic in stark and clear terms: either sacrifice a large number of innocent people or face human extinction. The architect of the survival plan says "the first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality, for its survival will mean our destruction." (p107)

The idea is that the military retreat to enclaves, and force the remaining mass of the population into centres where they are deliberately exposed to zombies as bait, buying time to prepare for the response and deflecting the flesh eating monsters on to the innocent victims.

Many people find this solution to be morally repugnant. But it is adopted, because the alternative is that everyone dies, or becomes a macabre living dead.

The dilemmas continue. A soldier in Germany confronts the matter of conscience of abandoning innocent civilians to be eaten by zombies. He plans to refuse evacuation orders and is told traitors will be prosecuted with Russian efficiency, through the decimation of mutinous units. In the line of duty, some are classed as necessary, some expendable.

It's a hard thing to contemplate, and who would want to be the one to make that decision? But probably, it would have to be this way. Or at least, this decision would be made by those in power.

Life doesn't seem to be geared toward stability. Life over-produces and lets hardship winnow the numbers. Humanity has got to the point where we have far exceeded the natural world's ability to sustain us. We live in such numbers only through our own resourcefulness. When an emergency like this hits, a real existential threat to life, what could we actually save?

it's a difficult thought.

Well, what would be important to save? Certainly not our cell phones - if a good portion of the population is going to die, there wouldn't be too many people to talk to or text.

I'd say survival items - kits that enable you to turn salt water into drinking water, etc.

A can opener would be good too. All the stores would be closed and I imagine the safest things to eat would be foods in cans.