Brendan’s been missing the Town of Cary’s Haunted House for the last two years, so when I saw that Wake Forest was calling for Zombie Volunteers for an Apocalypse Survival event, we signed up immediately!

The event consisted of teams of 2-4 players that ran around with flag football ‘life’ belts and tried to collect six items for survival while avoiding groups of zombies that roamed around. Our goal was to capture as many life flags as possible — hard to do when we were supposed to be slow (walking dead) zombies vs fast (world war z) ones.

Wake Forest hired a professional face painter, Cindy’s Faces, to make us up as scary zombies, and Brendan and I were lucky enough to be the first ones painted, so we had a little more detail than everyone else. Cindy and her daughter first applied silicone prosthetics to imitate scars, pustules, and skin falling off before airbrushing the dead color onto our faces. Finally, they added some fake blood and we were off to the races!

The event was pretty cool, and we managed to scare some teenagers (and adults) by sneaking up behind them. In the end, we could only grab one life flag between the two of us but everyone still had fun even if most all the teams stayed alive!