The coming apocalypse

Apparently the end of the world, at least in Hyde Park, will contain zombies, and lots of them. One of the student organizations here is called the Zombie Readiness Taskforce, and right now they're putting on an event called Humans v Zombies, or something like that, until the end of the month. Basically, everyone who wants to play signs up and gets an orange bandana and a Nerf gun. A few people are assigned to be zombies, but most, at least at the beginning, are humans. Zombies wear their bandanas on their heads, while humans wear theirs as armbands. Basically, all UChicago buildings themselves are safe, as are off-campus buildings not owned by UChicago and CTA buses, but the open air is not. Zombies run around trying to tag humans; once tagged, you become a zombie. Humans have their Nerf guns, and if you shoot a zombie that zombie is temporarily paralyzed and can't tag anyone for 15 minutes.

I absolutely hate anything and everything to do with zombies, and so I'm not participating, but a few of my housemates are playing. Last I knew they were still armed humans fighting off the zombie invasion, but I think they've had a few close calls. I've never actually seen a shootout happen with my own eyes, but there are a significant minority of people wearing orange bandanas, either wrapped intricately in their hair (a lot of girls playing really seem to jazz it up) or clinging desperately to human arms. It's especially evident in the dining hall, where there are lots of people together; every house table has at least one or two people in orange. Dining halls are safe zones, of course, so there aren't any shootouts there, but there are occasionally some glances from side to side; after all, you don't want to leave and get ambushed by a bunch of zombies just outside the dining hall.

I don't know how the people playing don't go crazy; I can't even stand it when our house plays assassins in the spring. I just hate running around trying to tag or shoot or squirt or what have you, and I equally hate the idea of being caught off guard by someone. When we play assassins, individual rooms and the dining hall and classrooms are off-limits, but the rest of campus is dangerous, and if you can get someone to crawl into your bed with you, then killing them is fair game (crimes of passion, after all, are no crimes at all). Needless to say, I don't play any type of game like this, but it is pretty amusing at times to watch people getting extremely paranoid about going outside.