Reading this thread makes me wish I survived long enough to get a mechanics skill good enough to do any of this.
Start with 12+ strength, Self-Defense Training, 4 skill in Unarmed, and Krav Maga as your selected martial arts style. Be prudent with fighting on flat terrain and pick your fights behind windows or vehicles, and remember that you run faster than everything except dogs and wolves, you don't need to fight everything, and for the first few days you don't even want to fight anything. Just run through town collecting food and water, then retreating outside of town and reading skillbooks until you've got enough survival, cooking, and tailoring to move into town full-time. Once you reach that point, it's easier to survive in town, eat wolves and funnel-water, and focus on other skillbooks like mechanics, electronics, and high-level cooking. You'll find it won't take that long to drain the zombie population from a small city and be left with wolves, spiders, wasps, and the occasional bear.
Speaking of: It seems a zombie doesn't have to die to be removed from the population pool. Driving a motorcycle through a new city will draw a huge horde to follow you, but when you drive far enough that they despawn then when you return they won't be there to harass you again. It seems (to my untrained eye) that spawning a zombie takes it from the region population. Instead, I think when a zombie is killed it should lower the population of the map tile it died on.