Zombie Outbreak? Here’s the Safest Place in Texas

You’re in downtown San Antonio and suddenly you see a horde of bloody figures limping towards you. They want your brains.

Do you know where you would go if the undead started taking over your Texas city?

If you believe Cornell University’s zombie simulation, you might want to head over to Big Bend National Park.

Alex Anemi was one of the researchers who created the model.

“It was a project for a class on statistical mechanics, a graduate class, and we had to do a final project and at the time I was interested in learning more about the techniques people used model real diseases and study critical phenomena,” Anemi says. “I had just read ‘World War Z’ by Max Brooks, so I had zombies on the mind and thought it would be fun to try to study zombies as a disease.”

By clicking on a city in Anemi’s model, you can see zombies taking over the entire country and change the variables like the bite-to-kill ratio, i.e. the amount of zombies infecting humans versus the amount of zombies being killed by humans.

“The way the model plays out is once you get outside areas with high population density, once the population density gets lower, the dynamics of the disease slows way down,” Anemi says. “People are still succumbing just as much, it’s just as virulent and just as bad, but everything slows way down.

“So it’s the most remote areas that sort of last the longs, that it take the longest for the zombies to reach.”