The zombie horde is coming. The pandemic is spreading. An EMP just fried the grid. One way or another, you need to get out of this soon-to-be-godforsaken city. You gaze forlornly at your glorious pile of technology, knowing you’ve gotta make a hard choice about what to bring.


All week at Gizmodo, we’ve been exploring survival — how to prepare for the next major earthquake, how humans engineer for disaster, and how to survive the terrible, meaningless accidents that hit us out of nowhere. We’ve also spoken with experts about how to survive the collapse of civilization itself.

But honestly, we’re going to be some pretty woebegone survivors without our precious devices. So, we want to know which of those devices to bring. What piece of technology will shield us from the nuclear fallout, help us evade the cannibalistic road warriors, or simply keep us entertained in a world without Netflix? What’s the one device we should all be bringing into our apocalypse bunkers, no matter what? Doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does have to be damn useful.


Image: The radio tranceiver I’ll use to chat with the International Space Station after the apocalypse, via Shutterstock