Footsteps pound down an alleyway. You don’t want to look back because that might slow you down. Why can’t your feet move any faster than this? You hear him gaining distance. You can’t let him catch you. If he catches you you’ll become one of them. And you’ll be dead to your friends.

No, this isn’t a zombie apocalypse or infection story, though it may as well be one. This is Journey to the End of the Night, a massive game of survival tag organized in major cities, and on Saturday hundreds of players were running around the streets of San Francisco.

Players were given two ribbons: a blue ribbon to race and a red ribbon to chase and a map of six checkpoints that they had to reach by 11pm either by foot or public transit. The game started at 7pm in Dolores Mission Park and players began with blue ribbons, but once tagged by a chaser they had to give up their blue ribbon and wear the red. Then they could either catch as many blues as possible or go to the resurrection point (with a quota of one resurrection) and run again.

The survival rate was low. By 8pm the Mission District was teeming with red-ribboned chasers prowling for the ever straggling blue-ribboned runners. There were those who avoided getting caught and made it to the finish (though I was not one of them.) The runners who lasted the night tended to travel in a small groups and took the longer routes and the shadier streets.

I was caught within the first hour just a block away from the safe zone, no less. I traveled in a pack of eight, and though we took the side streets, once we neared our first checkpoint we were obvious prey for chasers and we scattered. A couple of friends and I were chased down an alley and at the intersecting street we turned and ran right into a group of chasers. Well, it was a great adrenaline rush.

You’d be surprised what you’re willing to do when pursued. There was a lot of dashing across streets, high-tailing through alleyways, ducking behind parked cars, and hiding in bushes. Kids play similar games in the suburbs, but this may not be the safest game to play in Mission District (hence the waiver). At one point, my fellow chasers and I were cornering some of runners just off 26th street and a local drove by and yelled, “You can’t go running around like that in the goddamn ‘hood.” The residents of the area curious to know what was going on, that’s for sure.

Though the game slowed once the majority of players had become chasers and opted to relax at the restaurants and bars (this game will definitely introduce you to the city). It left me wondering about the real thing – could I survive a zombie apocalypse or an epidemic like in 28 Days Later? Would I even want to try? Apocalyptic films are always about the remaining survivors and it seems easy to manage on screen, but in reality it is difficult not to die. You have to run fast.

28 Days Later gave rise to speedy zombies.

Somebody pointed out to me that zombies have been disconcertingly agile ever since 28 Days Later came out in 2002. Until then, zombies had followed in the the stiff and heavy footsteps of zombies from The Night of the Living Dead. Now they can run. So you have to run even faster.

Back in the day, it wasn’t so easy for zombies to shake off the rigor mortis.

Not only that, but you must be resourceful and independent, like the characters of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which is a post-apocalyptic novel of a man and his son in a man-eat-man world (yes, I mean cannibalism). It’s not world wracked by a zombie epidemic, but it’s just as bleak – you can’t trust anyone, you’re constantly on the move, and you never know when your next meal is and must scavenge a deserted civilization. It is more stressful than midterm season.

I learned two things I learned from that book. In the event of the end of civilization, there will be no fresh water, so fill the bathtub with water while the plumbing still works. Also, if you run out of bullets besides the one you’re saving for yourself, carve some fake ones so that your gun still appears loaded.

Even if you don’t believe the world will end in your lifetime, making survival strategies is a good form of entertainment during class. (Could you hurdle over the rows of the lecture hall and make it to the exit before the zombies catch you? You’d could lighten your load and slow them down by throwing your textbooks at them first.) And if Yoshua has managed to convince you the world will soon end (as it was supposed to several times before), then come out of your underground bunker and run the streets of San Francisco to see if you’re really up for the challenge.

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