Zombies are everywhere, finally seeping (as zombies are wont to do) out of a spectacularly violent sub-genre of horror films into mainstream popularity. As a longtime horror fan, this phenomena has been really surprising to me, but audiences everywhere have embraced the flesh-eating, reanimated dead.

One thing that zombie movies and television shows seem to bring out in most people is a game of "What would I do if this shit really happened?"

For some reason, the concept of a zombie apocalypse is appealing to many people. Perhaps watching a few episodes of "The Walking Dead" has led them to believe that they would prosper if zombies were really ambling around, munching on the brains of people too slow or stupid to walk quickly away from them. Assuming that they weren't the first to be ambushed and devoured or nipped on the hand by their former babysitter, many people play through scenarios in their heads figuring out the ways that they would stay alive while everyone else was turned into a panicking buffet for the hoards of multiplying corpses.

I've done it myself. Ever since watching the original Dawn of the Dead as a young teen, the idea of finding the perfect place to hunker down and survive a zombie apocalypse has crossed my mind a few times.

For the sake of fun, let's consider a few places in the Houston area that would be fit as locations to repel or at least hide from murderous, flesh eating zombies.

First let's be clear that the actual best place would be anywhere but Houston.

Being almost anywhere in one of the largest metropolitan areas of the United States during a zombie apocalypse would put a person at an immediate disadvantage. With more than six million people in Houston and its surrounding areas, that's a lot of potential candidates to join the zombie population, eager to catch an unfortunate human and make a meal out of him or her. Ditto on the bad news for anyone who decides to flee the city via automobile, since the highways out of town would rapidly become a parking lot when a million people all try to leave at the same time.

A person already living a few miles outside of the dense central core of Houston would probably stand a better chance at surviving the initial outbreak of hungry zombies, simply because anywhere with fewer people would lessen the numbers of the undead. Living out in the sticks would also give a person a head start to hit the road if they heard that Houston was being turned into a human smorgasbord early enough.

But since these zombie uprisings never seem to come with a warning, we'll assume that most people not already living outside of town will have the chance to run somewhere else, and will have to take their chances inside the city.