If trying to infiltrate the Robots, you won’t need much of a disguise – just a bit of silver spray paint on the face[30] or some cutlery taped to your hands.
While tourists are exempt from Hierarchian law, it’s still best to know the visual signifiers of class during the current dystopia. If in doubt, dress like an extremely camp Roman.
— TESTIMONIALS —
I came to the Badlands as part of my gap year, on a three-month volunteering trip to help build a new orphanage. I worked really hard and got horrible lumpy sunburn, but at least the poor orphans would be terribly grateful for everything I’d done for them. Or so I thought. As soon as we opened the bloody place, the little bastards burned it down for fun and then robbed me blind. So ungrateful.
— Tamara Pibsley, 18, Student
Talk complete shite
Patterns of speech in Wasteland are eccentric to say the least, so you’d do well to pepper your speech with mangled slogans from the past, archaic words in weird contexts, and slang you’ve made up on the spot.
Be discreet about medicine
The locals might make it look easy to swan around in the fallout all day and only get a couple of weird lumps to show for it, but they are adapted to this environment – try it yourself and you’ll be shedding hair in hamster-sized clumps within hours. You’ll need to bring a battery of medications, and you’ll need to keep their use hidden, or else you risk a sweating giant with a hockey mask asking if you brought enough for everyone.
Be careful about pretending to be a god
Weird desert cargo cults eat fewer tourists than they used to, but it’s still worth exercising caution. If you’re a guest of one, don’t pretend to be their god in order to swindle your way into swankier digs – it’s a classic schoolboy error. Everyone thinks they’re the first to try it, but they always regret it when they end up locked in an industrial microwave as a sacrifice after two weeks of luxury.
4. SUGGESTED ITINERARIES
1. GHOUL RUNNINGS:(10 DAYS)
Zombie Hunting in the Land of the Dead
For some reason, one of the most common shared fantasies among human beings is surviving the mass resurrection of the hostile dead. If that sounds like fun to you, so will this itinerary.
DAY 1
The trip starts out with a serious jolt of adrenaline, as you’re dropped by parachute in the middle of zombie territory with only your wits and a rifle to protect you.[31] From there, it’s up to you to navigate your way through the eerie, deserted landscape to the nearest shelter, with plenty of great jump-scare opportunities along the way.[32]
DAY 2
Unless you’ve seriously fucked it, evening of the second day should see you arrive at the fortified Sunnyville Megamall, where you’re bound to find a band of survivors. Many of them will be former tourists who’ve decided to live the lifestyle full time, so it should be fairly easy to beg your way in through the barricades. After a simple campfire meal in a trashed sporting goods store – a great point to start developing alliances for the mayhem to come – it’ll be time for a whimsical dance with flickering jury-rigged Christmas lights before a trip to the mall’s roof. There, you can drink old whiskey and look down on the hordes of corpses outside, while enjoying sobering reflections on how the zombies ‘aren’t that different to us’.[33]
DAYS 3–5
On day three, you’ll get your chance to exercise what definitely aren’t buried homicidal urges, as you’re issued one of the mall’s sniper rifles and posted in a water tower to chip away at the horde, bullet by bullet. When you’re done shooting, you can join the other survivors in scavenging the mall, picking up some great pop-culture souvenirs in the process. At night, it’ll be time for more dancing and whiskey. This schedule of murderous monotony might go on for several days, but it’s usually around day five that the survivors pick up a faint radio signal asking for help, and have to send a group of volunteers on a desperate mission into the Z-Zone. Pack your bags!
DAYS 6–9
You’ll hit the road at dawn – perhaps in a car, but more likely on foot. Combat will be light at first, so it’s worth building a strong rapport with the ragtag band you’re travelling with. After all, if you let yourself slip into the role of ‘abrasive twat who nobody trusts’ you’ll be thrown to the dead at the first twitch of a cadaver. As the road trip progresses, your encounters with the living dead will get more and more intense, as will the contrived ethical dilemmas the party faces. Inevitably, a situation will arise where the gentlest soul in the group turns out to be hiding a zombie bite, and everyone will spend a miserable afternoon deciding to shoot them.[34] That’s generally the low point of the trip.
The dust storm abated around midday, leaving a silence so profound that we could hear the trickle of individual sand grains down the pitted faces of the skyscrapers around us. This was it: the fabled Business Place. And although our guide assured us this city was dead rather than Dead, to us it seemed the very definition of ‘too quiet’, and we kept our hands close to our carbines.
Still, the silence persisted – until I trod on the bloody bone. It was a rib or something, and I barely had time to register the bitemarks along its length before it had snapped in two, echoing through the bleached streets like a gunshot. We froze as the first howl drifted up from some distant rooftop, before being answered from right across the street. Then the noise was everywhere, a dreadful moan that harrowed our nerves, loosened our bladders and rattled the cracked windows
