Sadly, Comic-Con 2013 is over, but luckily I survived. And that’s not just some cheesy metaphor. Every year there seems to be some fluke accident or Hall H pencil stabbing that occurs so there is always that off chance things might go awry.
For me, it could have happened when I went through The Walking Dead Escape. As we have mentioned in the past, The Walking Dead Escape is a zombie run combined with a pretty intense obstacle course which left my palms scarred since SDCC 2012. This year though I was determined to be a survivor and I had a plan.
Most importantly was that this time I wasn’t alone. Joining me on the course this time were The Flickcast’s WallE and our own social media ninja Marissa (sadly a social media ninja’s main powerset revolves around social media and not the art of ninjitsu but we made due).
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record our adventure through the outbreak in Petco Park, but I’ll do my best to walk you through what happened. At the start, we were corralled into a fenced in area on one of the lower levels which is never a good feeling to be fenced into anywhere when there are walkers around and you hear screams of an earlier wave of survivors in the distance. Suddenly a fence popped open and we all rushed up a stairwell to one of the top levels of the stadium.
From there things started out kind of chaotically as it was an everyman for themselves scenario. People began to bottleneck and stop when a lone walker got close and we started seeing people get infected. So we held back and found another foursome of survivors to work with and that’s when the game changed.
We remembered the rules. Walkers are slow moving and easily distracted. If one of us bangs on metal and shouts, the walker will focus on that person and everyone else can sneak by. It was only when groups of people got bunched up did we see people get caught. So when there was only seven of us, we were able to use the bait and switch strategy to get past most obstacles. There was even a point where we were running under some wire and I put my arm through to get the zombies attention for Marissa and WallE to sneak by.
The only problem we encountered as a group after that surprisingly didn’t come from the arena which was loaded with walkers. Instead it came from a lone girl in the middle of the course. After jumping over some plastic jersey barriers, the little girl who was facing away from us turned back around to reveal she was infected and grabbed Marissa who we thought got away unscathed. Later after going up and across some scaffolding, a group of us got bottlenecked inside a shipping container and we think that is where WallE got grabbed as well even though we didn’t see a scrape.
Finally we saw the home stretch. About fifty yards from where we stood was the edge of the quarantine zone. But in the middle were about fifteen to twenty walkers and five broken down police cars. It was all or nothing. I helped a few people get past a walker by banging on the back of a police car and then I saw my opening. There was a huge stretch of safety just on the other side of a car that’s front was pressed up against a fence.
I got a running start and pulled a Dukes of Hazard over the hood and made my way to the quarantine tent. I had worried that a walker had gotten a hold of me but they said I was clean. WallE and Marissa weren’t so lucky. Walkers had gotten enough of a hold of them that to prevent infection, they each got a bullet in the head…
But hey, I survived. Hopefully they can contain the infection long enough for us to return in 2014 and this time remember to bring the GoPro cameras with us.
