If you were trapped in an elevator during
the early stages of a zombie apocalypse, what would you do? I’m going to break down the mistakes made,
what you should do, and how to beat the zombie outbreak in The End? I know I’m not the only one who randomly
thinks, “what if a zombie apocalypse broke out right now?” Walking your dog, taking a shower, stuck in
traffic, or trapped in an elevator like Claudio. With zombies trying to worm their way into
the half-open elevator, we’ll need to figure out how to defend ourselves. Let’s see if we can stay above ground. Today is not Claudio’s lucky day. Already late for an important meeting, he
suddenly finds himself stuck between the sixth and seventh floors in a stalled out elevator
car. Claudio keys the call button to reach maintenance,
but when they can’t give him a straight answer on when he might be free, he demands
a direct line to the team responsible for making the repair. According to the elevator repairman, there’s
something wrong with one of the generators. Claudio politely informs him he’s a fucking
moron for not immediately solving all the world’s problems, but something up on the
roof has him too distracted to reply. Suddenly, the repairman yells at his coworker
to run for his life, and the line goes dead. Claudio reports the situation back to the
maintenance man, but decides not to mention all the terrified screaming. With maintenance going to check on the issue,
Claudio decides to take matters into his own hands. He forces the car gate open to find he’s
just barely below the seventh floor. Unfortunately, the hoistway door is too stiff
to open more than a few inches. Now face to face with freedom, he shouts for
help into the adjoining office, but the place seems deserted. Just then, Claudio’s wife Lorena calls in
a panic. It seems someone is pounding on their front
door, but whoever it is won’t respond when she calls out to them. She’s tried calling the police, but all
the emergency lines are down. Claudio tells her to lock herself in their
bedroom and promises to send his personal driver, Stefano, over to check things out. Terrified, she begs him to come home, but
all he can do is try to keep her calm until he finds a way out of his wood paneled prison. According to the news, shit is really hitting
the fan. The streets of Rome have descended into utter
chaos, with various sources citing widespread terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, all Claudio can do is try to maintain
his sanity while he waits for help to arrive. From out of nowhere, a crowd of frightened
office workers stampedes past the elevator bank. As Claudio tries in vain to get their attention,
a woman, Marta, falls down next to him and attempts to crawl inside, only to be violently
dragged away by an unseen attacker. Thoroughly freaked the fuck out, Claudio tries
peaking out into the hall when a pair of blood soaked coworkers dive at him. But before they can climb their way inside,
the sound of more survivors draws their attention elsewhere. Huh, that explains all the screaming. We definitely should have told the maintenance
guy about the repairmen screaming their lungs out, especially if he’s going up to check
on it in person. For all we know, they just saw fucking Godzilla
out there and now the only other person in the building capable of helping us is on his
way to get barbequed. I’d probably wait a bit longer before going
gorilla arms on the cargate, but at least we know where we are now. Before sticking any part of my body through
the gap, I would make sure to hit the emergency stop, just in case this thing randomly decides
to come back to life and do us Final Destination style. The whole seventh floor being quiet as a graveyard
should be cause for alarm, especially with the repair team freaking out like that. We should call some of our colleagues in the
building and ask if they know anything about this, or if they’d be willing to check it
out. At the very least, we should ask our assistant
to come bring us some water bottles and Snickers bars in case this turns into a sleepover. Some pillows and a blanket couldn’t hurt
either. Lorena’s phone call cranks the severity
of this situation from pain in the ass to personal Hell. Not only do we need to GTFO to check on our
wife, shit popping off city wide could be what’s behind all the weird stuff we’re
dealing with. Even though she said the emergency lines were
down, I’d still try calling 113, Italy’s 911, just in case the issue was somehow localized. If we get through, we should first report
the situation back at our house and then request the fire department to try and rescue us from
the elevator. I’m not sure why Marta would try and claw
her way into the elevator when she clearly had enough time to get back on her feet and
haul ass out of there. Besides, if she can squeeze her way in, then
who's to say whatever’s chasing her couldn’t also. At that point we’d just be an easy double
kill. There’s no way in a million year’s Claudio
would have predicted it’d be zombies storming the building, but this revelation completely
changes the nature of his predicament. The elevator is no longer a prison cell, well,
okay, it definitely still is, but it’s also a sort of shark cage against the infected. Our goal should no longer be to find a way
out, instead we need to take stock of everything we have and sit tight until Chris Redfield
shows up to boulder punch every zombie right in the face. As soon as the coast is clear, I’d try my
best to slide the doors closed, although given how hard it was to get them open this far,
that’s probably not even an option. We should also try to knock out the lights
and then tuck ourselves into a corner on the exit side to stay out of sight. As long as the infected don’t have a reason
to try and get in, they’ll probably just stick to chasing people that don’t have
the luxury of an impenetrable steel box to hide in. We’ll also want to preserve our phone battery
as much as possible as we have no way of knowing how long we’re going to be stuck here. I’d send a text to my colleagues, friends,
and loved ones describing our location and then shut my phone off until I have a reason
to use it. Speaking of loved ones, as shitty as it is,
there’s not much we can do for Lorena besides telling her to barricade herself in the most
secure room in our house and find something to arm herself with. Even if we could get out of the office, it
sounds like the whole city is completely fucked. The chances of us making it home un-zombified
are pretty much zero. It’s not glamorous, but our best option
is to stay put and wait for help to arrive. That said, it’s not like we’re trapped
in a Walmart. If a couple days pass and there’s still
no sign the military is about to turn things around, we’ll need to find a way out before
we’re too weak from starvation and delirium to get ourselves to safety. We should formulate a couple escape plans
ahead of time and wait until things are quiet to put them into action. The first thing I’d check out is whether
there’s a hatch on the roof of the car we can climb out. Unfortunately, on most modern elevators, these
hatches are locked from the outside, but it’s always worth a shot. Otherwise, I would rip off the handrail to
try and pry the doors open a little wider, although this is sure to make a lot of noise,
so once we have enough space to crawl out, there’s no going back. Still shitting himself over the close encounter,
Claudio gets a call from Stefano, who’s caught in traffic on his way to check on Lorena. He takes the opportunity to babble incoherently
about crazy people until the call drops at the sound of Stefano crashing. Just then, the custodian comes back on over
the intercom claiming the repair team has gone missing. Claudio sounds off with the same unhelpful
hysteria until he hears the zombies breaking into the control room. After a few seconds of, “oh god their coming
in through the backdoor ahhh”, the intercom goes silent. Much to his relief, Claudio gets a call back
from his assistant, Sara, prompting him to forget all about the undead cannibals prowling
around the building and rest his back against the open doors. Almost immediately, a mangled arm wraps around
his neck, but Claudio manages to break free without getting infected blood in his mouth. It turns out to be Marta from earlier, only
she’s not looking so good. Instead of cowering in the corner like last
time, he breaks off the nearby handrail and takes her out. Realizing whatever’s turning people into
mindless killing machines is likely coursing through their veins, Claudio takes a water
bottle from his briefcase and washes the blood from his face and hands, and then uses some
report papers to soak up the small pool accumulating on the elevator floor. The sound of nearby footsteps brings his attention
back to the office, where he spots a woman named Silvia creeping through the hall. Promising to get her out of this nightmare
in one piece, he enlists her help in prying open the doors, but the commotion only attracts
more infected. Unable to squeeze into the elevator car, Silvia
runs away to find a hiding place. Seconds later, another brain eater takes her
place in the doorway, but before Claudio can feed him the handrail, Silvia tees off with
a golf driver and follows up with some rage fueled love taps. Unfortunately, her triumph is short lived
as a horde of zombies drawn in by her war cry quickly overpowers her and begins tearing
her limb from limb. I get things are kinda hectic right now, but
for fuck’s sake, dude, use your words. I doubt we could have done anything to prevent
Stefano from wrecking, but we could have at least warned the maintenance guy about the
roving packs of man eating pencil pushers coming to make him lunch. Now the only person in the building who knows
where we are is Sara, and I highly doubt she cares about climbing the corporate ladder
enough to risk being eaten alive for her rude boss. By calling her we’re just wasting battery
and needlessly putting her life in danger if she forgot to silence her phone. Once Sara calls us back, Claudio is extra
stupid for putting his back to the open doors like that, especially since two zombies just
tried squeezing through less than five minutes ago. We’ve already established that we can’t
fit through the doors, so unless we’re actively trying to pry them open, there’s no real
reason for us to ever go near them. Props to Claudio for swimming out of that
chokehold without getting bit, as well as using the broken handrail to bash some zombie
brains in. We shouldn’t have gotten ourselves in this
situation to begin with, but it did serve to teach us some useful things about the infected:
one, they can turn others into more zombies, and two, they can be killed with normal physical
means. While these might seem like no-brainers to
your average zombie horror enthusiast, we shouldn’t automatically assume this living
nightmare was written and directed by George A. Romero. It’s only been a few minutes since we saw
Marta get dragged off, so it seems the transformation process is fairly rapid. Because of this, we should avoid anyone showing
signs of having been attacked such as deep scratches or bite marks. After neutralizing the threat, we should have
given her a couple safety smacks and then searched her pockets for anything useful. It might seem grotesque, but it’s the only
way we’ll be able to access more supplies while trapped in the elevator. I highly doubt she was packing a Desert Eagle,
.5-0, under her blouse, but she probably had a cell phone on her we could use to call emergency
services without using up our own phone’s battery. I get why Claudio would want to clean the
potentially contaminated blood from his face and hands, but this is a very poor use of
our limited water supply. We’d be better off using our jacket to wipe
away the blood and save the water to drink in the hours our days ahead. That said, killing zombies is messy work,
so it’d probably be a good idea to improvise some PPE to keep the blood splatter out of
our eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. I’d take my shirt off and fashion it into
a face mask whenever I was about to throw down. It’s not perfect, but it’ll keep blood
from accumulating on our face and dripping down into our eyes and mouth. It’s nice of Silvia to try and help, but
the fact that Claudio’s still alive means he’s probably a lot safer in the elevator
than sneaking around a zombie infested building. If I couldn’t squeeze in myself, I would
just get the hell out of there and send someone to get him out later. Coming back to Andrew Ryan that ugly ass infected
was cool and all, but also entirely unnecessary. Claudio was perfectly capable of killing that
zombie himself, and even if he couldn’t, there was no way for it to ever actually get
to him. Not sure why she would stand there like a
lemon after racking up a single kill; the whole place is fucking crawling with freaks. She should have expected more would be on
the way, especially after screaming like a banshee while pounding away at the first one. Claudio tries calling his wife once again. This time she answers, but the situation is
grim. Whoever was beating on their front door has
now made it inside the house. He tells her to push their armoire against
the bedroom door, but it’s not enough to keep the intruders at bay. Yet again, after a few seconds of, “oh god
they're coming in through the backdoor”, the call ends. This development only pushes Claudio further
towards despair, and when another one of his coworkers happens upon his situation, he only
sits and sulks while the newcomer frantically works to pry open the doors. After more zombies chase the man away, Claudio
decides to take a more proactive approach to combating the infection. He lures a group of biters over to the doors
and starts wailing away with his improvised weapon. But before he can pile up enough bodies for
an InstaKill, some cries for help coming down the hall turn their attention towards easier
prey. This time it’s Claudio’s assistant, Sara. She begs him for help, but all he can do is
try to distract them while she runs away. With nowhere left to go, Sara tries locking
herself in a nearby office, but the horde barges in before she can shut the door, sealing
her fate as a human happy meal. We just learned with Silvia that the zombies
are attracted to sound, so we should have told Lorena to keep quiet and find some place
to hide in case they broke into the room. It’s not like we’re dealing with detectives
here. Just shutting herself in a closet and keeping
her mouth shut should be enough to get them off her case. We’d also want to mention bludgeoning them
over the head with something solid as a last resort if she were spotted. The new guy looked like he had a bit more
upper body strength than Silvia did, so it’s possible the two of us might have been able
to pry the doors open. However, this still doesn’t change the fact
we’re probably better off waiting inside for help to arrive. I would have told the man it’s no use and
asked him to go find help. It could have also been useful to trade numbers
with him to help us get a sense of what the situation was like on other floors or out
on the streets, provided he didn’t get nomed the second he walked out of view, that is. I’m all for curing the infection one beating
at a time, but we might want to conserve our strength and only kill the zombies that stumble
upon us. On the other hand, it would give us a lot
more corpses to loot for materials, and if we killed enough, we could pile them into
a literal meat shield to keep others from nosing in. Like the human wall the 300 Spartans made. The only downside is that we’re probably
going to be stuck in here awhile with the intensifying pungent aroma of rotting meat
and fruity undertones. Unfortunately, Claudio baiting in a whole
bunch of zombies ensured Sara was pretty much fucked the moment she came around the corner. Had she been able to shut herself inside the
office a little faster, she might have been okay, but who knows if there weren’t already
infected waiting for her inside. With Sara gone and Lorena presumably dead,
we’ve just run out of people that know where we are. I would try and get a hold of anyone I could
in case search parties are formed to look for survivors. That may just be our only ticket out of here. Just when things couldn’t possibly get any
more FUBAR, the power goes out, leaving Claudio veiled in darkness as zombies begin to pile
up against the door. Suddenly, he hears someone whistle to the
zombies before racking a shotgun. An unknown SWAT cop blesses them both with
buckshot and steps into view, demanding to know if Claudio was bitten. Claudio explains he’s only wearing borrowed
blood and asks where the other units are, but the officer, Marcello, claims he lost
contact with the rest of his department. Just then, one of the injured infected randomly
reanimates and closes in for a quick bite, but Claudio calls it out before things can
get ugly. After dishing out another dose of lead, the
officer asks if there’s a backup generator they can use to restore power to the elevator. Claudio tells him about the one on the rooftop
mentioned by the repairman and agrees to talk him through the building via radio. Before he departs, Marcello hands Claudio
his Beretta Model 92FS and instructs him to smoke any biters without hesitation. Claudio guides Marcello as he blasts his way
through the zombie-strewn corridors up to the roof. Eventually, Marcello reaches the generator
and uses the control panel to power up the elevator, but the hoistway doors are still
jammed in place. Claudio moves in for a closer look at the
mechanism and narrowly avoids getting got in the process. He then picks up Marcello’s pistol and sends
his former colleagues back to hell one bullet at a time. There’s no time for celebration, however,
as Marcello suddenly winds up knee deep in dead himself. Following a steady stream of gunshots, f-bombs,
and “oh god they’re coming in through the backdoor”, the radio goes silent, and
once again Claudio finds himself all alone. As the sun begins to set, remnants of the
building’s security team make their way down the hall, but they’re too preoccupied
fighting off the infected to lend a helping hand. Fearing this to be the end, Claudio decides
to take the easy way out rather than die of thirst or join the undead hordes in their
endless quest for man meat. Just as he’s about to paint the wall behind
him, a voice from above calls his name. It’s Marcello, evidently having climbed
down the elevator shaft. Using the busted handrail, Claudio pries open
the roof hatch and helps the officer down into the car. Marcello returns the favor, turning his 12
gauge on the handful of zombies congregating outside the elevator, but all is not as well
as it seems. While making his way back to the seventh floor,
Marcello took a nasty bite to the inside of his leg, and his condition is deteriorating
rapidly. Already hacking up blood, he asks his new
friend to shoot him in the head before he turns, but Claudio refuses, even disarming
him when he tries to do the deed himself. Marcello begins coughing and retching uncontrollably. He slowly rises to his feet and launches himself
at Claudio, causing him to discharge the pistol into his own thigh. Before Marcello can smash his head in Mountain
style, however, Claudio pops him point blank in the abdomen and follows up with a double
tap to the forehead. As the adrenaline begins to fade, Claudio
becomes aware of the gaping hole in his leg and fashions a half assed tourniquet using
his neck tie. Attracted by the noise, another pack of zombies
rushes in to investigate. With his pistol now empty, Claudio picks up
the 870 and gets to work, but the recoil is more than he can manage. Far be it from me to look a gift horse in
the mouth, but why the hell would Marcello be clearing out random office buildings all
by himself? Call it selfish, but if I were him, I’d
use my training and equipment to go help my friends and family. Who knows? Maybe the infected murdered his pet rabbit. Given the zombies were only able to pile up
outside the elevator, it seems unnecessary for Marcello to hand over his sidearm like
that, especially since he’s the one that gets to have all the fun. That short barreled shotty isn’t gonna hold
too many shells, so having a pistol to transition to in a pinch might make all the difference
if he runs into a horde. We also have no way of knowing whether Claudio
can be trusted not to shoot us in the ass or pull a Dr. Fassbach. Dude literally points the thing right at us
as soon as he gets it! If anything I might have given him a whistle
or something to pull some of the zombies his way while I’m fighting my way up to the
roof. On the other side of things, Marcello’s
unreasonable generosity is a huge win for team Claudio. We should probably ask him if he has any extra
mags for the pistol though. Afterall, they don’t do either of us much
good sitting in his mag pouches three floors away. The real gem here, however, is the radio. Not only does it allow us to remotely guide
Marcello through the cubicle maze, we can also use it to scan for transmissions from
other survivors, or even the military. Even if the current plan goes pear shaped,
we might be able to summon another rescue team. Before sending Marcello off to risk life and
limb in service of someone he barely knows, we should warn him about the two repair guys
getting attacked on the roof. There’s no point in guiding him all the
way up there if he’s just gonna be walking straight into an ambush. It would also be worth trading cell numbers
with him in case something happens to either of our radios. Once the power was restored, I would hit the
emergency stop once or twice in case it was somehow tripped during the black out. After almost getting snacked on every time
we’ve gone near the doors up to this point, there’s no way I’m spending any amount
of time next to them staring up into the elevator shaft, especially with a radio ringing the
dinner bell right next to my head. I admire Claudio’s “shoot first, ask questions
never mindset,” but he’s pissing away an extremely valuable resource by shooting
when there’s a perfectly good handrail nearby he could use to bash their fucking brains
in. The elevator doors form a perfect death funnel
in that they force the attackers to present their most vulnerable parts within stabbing
distance. Marcello’s M9 only holds fifteen rounds
in a standard capacity magazine, and that’s assuming he hadn’t used it before handing
it over. The handrail on the other hand, only runs
out of gas when we do. Now that we know what’s causing the elevator
doors to stick open, we can use our handy dandy handrail to bust it loose and leave
whenever we want, but there’s still the question of whether or not that’s a good
idea. After all, if a heavily armed police officer
like Marcello couldn’t shoot his way through the horde, why would things go any better
for us? As soon as Marcello’s back at our side,
we should be asking him if he was bitten–just like he did to us when we first met–not
only because he’s a valuable ally, but because we’ve seen first hand an example of a once
healthy person joining the ranks of the undead. Once it’s confirmed, we can’t exactly
stage a quarantine, so as shitty as it is, we should probably oblige his request for
a swift death. That said, we don’t know for certain how
exactly the virus spreads, or whether certain people could be immune to infection. Yeah, right now he looks like ten pounds of
shit in a five pound bag, but that doesn’t mean he’s guaranteed to turn into a zombie. Instead of dropping him on the spot, we should
ask him to strip off all his equipment in case we need it later. We could then handcuff him and put him in
the corner to monitor his condition. If he starts looking at us like a meatball
sub, well, then it’s Old Yeller time. Given the circumstance, I would have approached
Marcello with the gun aimed and ready to fire in case he started acting all corpsy. Claudio’s extremely lucky his negligent
discharge missed the femoral artery. He was definitely in the ballpark there. Applying a tourniquet was the right move,
but his neck tie isn’t going to cut it. It would also be worth checking Marcello’s
chest rig as combat tourniquets are fairly standard pieces of kit, especially in a shit
hit the fan scenario. The pump action shotgun certainly has its
place in the zombie killing hall of fame, buuut you already know what I’m gonna say. Use the fucking handrail, man, especially,
if you’re too weak and pathetic to stand up to the recoil of 12 gauge like a god damned
adult! Some time later, Claudio awakens to the sound
of fully automatic gunfire. He then receives a phone call from an unknown
number. Turns out Lorena was saved by passing soldiers
while fleeing their home. With renewed determination, Claudio re-examines
the mechanism securing the door and smashes the shit out of it with the broken handrail. Finally able to fit through the exit, he takes
the shotgun and makes his escape. After trudging through a shitpile of shot
up bodies, Claudio makes his way to the lobby where he finds a crawler someone made to keep
the next wave from spawning. With his 12 gauge empty, he puts it down with
a curb stomp. The streets of Rome are completely empty,
save for the countless corpses left to bake in the Mediterranean sun. As Claudio marches through the carnage in
search of more survivors, he spots an unopened liter of milk in the bloodied hands of a lifeless
zombie, but before he can find another one with some Oreos, the cannibal corpse suddenly
pops up to repossess the beverage. Claudio cocks back to dish out the dairy,
when a rifle shot from nowhere splits the shambler’s head like an overripe melon. Realizing he’s been saved by a military
sniper, Claudio waves his arms and calls out to the soldiers watching nearby. If ever there was a time when sitting on your
ass and doing nothing was the right call, it’s now. We have confirmation that Lorena is safe and
sound, and unless the zombies suddenly learned to operate machine guns, soldiers are in the
building taking care of business. Might be time to actually play some of that
Raid Shadow Legends everyone’s been talking about. Seriously, though. We should just start yelling for them to come
find us, especially since we’re wearing a bullet and likely have a concussion. Besides, if they see us hobbling through the
building before we see them, there’s a chance they might mistake us for one of the freaks
and blow out our spine. Even if they’re just passing through, Lorena
knows where we are. Eventually she’ll be able to tell someone
to send a rescue team. If for some reason we just had to leave the
elevator, I would make sure I was bringing along everything of value I could possibly
carry. It’s gonna feel shitty looting the body
of the man who gave his life trying to save you, but his sacrifice would be entirely in
vain if we run out of shotgun shells halfway through a horde. It would also be a good idea to slip on his
body armor. Every bit of protection helps, who knows with
all the chaos whether zombies aren’t the only threats we might face out on the streets. The last thing we need is to survive the fucking
apocalypse only to get popped by some asshole looter cruising for a flatscreen. There’s also no reason for us to hurry out
of the building. As long as we’re leaving the safety of the
elevator, we should quietly poke around the offices for supplies like food and water,
or even just to charge our phone. After all, we don’t know how long we might
be walking before we find sanctuary or get picked up by the military. Speaking of which, now would be a great time
to get on the radio to try and call in a rescue. Soldiers were just firing within earshot,
so they’re bound to be within signal range. I’m sure mashing the crawler in the lobby
was immensely satisfying, but we should have just left it alone. It wouldn’t be worth the shotgun shell if
we had one, and stomping it out like that only put us at risk for infection. Besides, even with our wounded leg, there’s
no way that thing’s gonna catch up to us. Claudio also makes the classic mistake of
discarding his shotgun after running out of ammunition. Not only could it still serve as an effective
club, 12 gauge is one of the most widely produced cartridges to ever exist. It’s not unreasonable to think we could
reup from an abandoned police car or the body of a fallen officer. Milk was a bad choice, especially when it’s
been sitting out under the sun for the better part of a day. I get Claudio would probably be thirsty as
hell, but, just don’t. If we just couldn’t pass up on some hot
sour milk, we should have at least tapped the corpse on the face with the bottom of
our shoe before going in for the steal. That way, if it moves at all, we’re in prime
position to put the boots to it. It’s safe to say the sniper knew friend
from foe in this situation, but we should still wave our arms in the international sign
of distress to make sure we don’t catch a follow up shot. I’d keep my mouth shut while doing it though. Waking the dead is the last thing we want
to do. When it’s all said and done, Claudio managed
to fall ass backwards into victory over the undead, but he made a few key mistakes along
the way that cost the lives of others. Had he truly taken stock of the situation
from the beginning and realized the elevator was probably the only thing keeping him alive,
he likely wouldn’t have held up poor Silvia or lead Marcello on a suicide mission to restart
the power. He also failed to share critical information
with others on a number of occasions, failing to inform the maintenance guy of the zombie
threat and neglecting to share what he’d learned with Lorena during the home invasion. As for Marta and Sara, I’m not sure there’s
anything he could have done for either of them. Wrong place, wrong time, I guess. Ultimately, I think the zombie outbreak from
The End? was BEATEN. How would you have beaten The End? Would you have camped out in the elevator,
or made a go of it on foot? Let me know in the comments. Hit the like button to warn Marcello about
the zombies on the roof, and don’t forget to subscribe for more impeccably timed apocalypses. Thanks for watching, and remember, handrails
don’t run out of ammo.
