Everyone knows the zombie apocalypse is coming, and we need all our best scientific minds working on things like what to do, where to go, and whether you can kill a zombie just by setting fire to it or if you still have to stab it in the head. Important stuff. While doctors are working on a cure for the zombie virus and epidemiologists are figuring out how said virus will spread, statisticians like Alex Alemi are looking at the numbers. According to the Washington Post, Alemi and a team of Cornell researchers built a statistical model of a hypothetical zombie outbreak and used that information to figure out the best place in the world to be in the event of an apocalypse.

It might seem like the spread of a zombie virus would be pretty similar to the spread of any other virus, but Alemi says there are a lot of really profound differences. In other outbreaks, for example, victims either get well or die. But zombies don’t do either — they continue to walk around after death, potentially spreading the disease indefinitely. And the zombie virus isn’t airborne, which means officials wouldn’t have to worry that it might use mass transit to quickly traverse the globe. Zombies can only get from point A to point B by walking, or, more accurately, shambling. 

One major difference between a real zombie outbreak and the fictional ones we’re used to seeing on television would be the way that the disease spreads. Alemi says it would take time to get from a densely populated place like New York City to the rest of the world, so you wouldn’t have people in California experiencing the outbreak at the same time as people in Atlanta. 

So the real question is, when the zombie apocalypse happens (and it will, you know it will), who is going to survive the longest and where will those people live? The key, Alemi says, is to be as far away from population centers as possible. And that doesn’t mean moving to Death Valley, either, because Death Valley may be empty and inhospitable but it’s close enough to big cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas that zombies are going to make their way there fairly quickly. The best place to be, then: Somewhere far removed from population centers, like the Colorado Rockies and central Nevada. That is, assuming everyone doesn’t immediately pack up and move to those places at the first sign of an outbreak, because then the Colorado Rockies and central Nevada become the population centers, and everywhere else becomes a little safer. Hmm. Perhaps just build yourself an underground bunker regardless of where you are, and plan to come out like never.