Americans living in the Rockies stand a better chance of dodging the impact of a zombie apocalypse than their fellow urbanites.
Cities would fall quickly, suggests the "large-scale exact stochastic dynamical simulation of a zombie outbreak" by Cornell University in New York State.
But it would take weeks for a zombie plague to penetrate rural areas, and months to reach the Rocky Mountains, according to the extremely hypothetical mathematical study.
In pop culture, "if there is a zombie outbreak, it is usually assumed to affect all areas at the same time," said Alex Alemi, one of four graduate students who undertook the research.
"But in our attempt to model zombies somewhat realistically, it doesn't seem like this is how it would actually go down," he said.
Based on the team's simulation, the densely-populated and highly-urbanised east and west coasts would be the first to succumb to a zombie plague.
