Back Off, Zombie: Brookline Business Teaches Zombie Defense

When the zombie apocalypse occurs, you’ll probably be brushing your teeth, or grocery shopping, something where your brain getting eaten is the furthest thing from your mind.

If you’re not prepared, you’ll definitely be bitten, infected and turned undead, but if you know what to do you might be able to live long enough to watch the tanks roll into town and napalm those dirty rotten zombies to oblivion.

And until now, anyone interested in acquiring the skills to stave off hoards of brain-gobbling monsters had to train themselves from books. But a new business on Brookline Boulevard is offering a more personal solution: a zombie self-defense class that teaches skills for battling any attacker, undead or living.

Zomburgh is the (uneaten) brainchild of Norm Davis, a 28-year-old zombie and survival enthusiast. Davis felt the current slate of zombie offerings in the Pittsburgh didn’t match the region's stature — the home of filmmaker George Romero and his pioneering “Night of the Living Dead.”

“We’re the zombie capital of the United States, of the world really,” Davis said, but after the one-two punch of World Zombie Day in mid-October and Halloween, the city rests on its laurels while other cities around the world zombie it up.

Davis considered opening a zombie-themed novelty shop, but decided on something practical: “a disaster survival class with a zombie flavor to it.”

His shop looks like Bela Lugosi’s summer home: red walls streaked in blue veins, a checkerboard floor, two crushed velvet chairs and an herbal tea sampler in the corner.

The man protecting Brookline from zombie attack one person at a time is Josh Kern, a 23-year-old EMT who discovered his natural skill for martial arts and self-defense at age 4. Some playground bullies chucked rocks at his head and he snagged the projectiles out of the air.

In his beginner’s class, the zombies are “shamblers,” the old-school zombies that shuffle, arms-outstretched, toward living flesh, much like inebriated miscreants portentously approaching down darkened sidewalks.

“Keep in mind, all these tactics will work against someone who is drunk,” Kerns says. His course mixes improvisation, technique and theater. He shows students how to immobilize an attacker by grabbing his elbow (a technique rendered useless if a zombie's arms come off).

“I could teach you how to use a PVC pipe in a way that will make you cry for the rest of your life,” he says, before attempting to eat the brains of a student and tumbling over after getting playfully thwacked in the temple.

In later classes, the zombies speed up, roughly to the speed of a mugger, for instance, increasing the ways students can get infected by a blood-borne pathogen.

“You should be good enough by that point to avoid getting scratched,” Kern said.