Surrounded by Zombies

Last week, we were driving home from a work trip and realized we were on a road close to the ocean. We pulled off at the first town I recognized by name and parked at the end of the boardwalk in the public lot, intending to have a quick walk near the water before heading home.

As we were walking to the beach, we noticed a group of young adults leaning against a nearby car applying zombie makeup. What fun! They had decided to mark Halloween a few weeks early.

We got up to the boardwalk and noticed a shambling family, all splattered with fake blood. Interesting. So it seems like more people had the idea to celebrate Halloween in early October.

We took a few steps through an open-air indoor mall to continue on the boardwalk and emerged into a crowd of over 1,000 people, ALL DRESSED AS ZOMBIES. There were multiple zombie Santas, four zombie Marilyn Monroes, and a whole crew of zombie construction workers. There were also four random people holding signs and shouting that everyone was going to hell, plus a steampunk man riding a penny farthing with a bubble machine on the back. People were staring at us and our lack of costumes.

We had inadvertently stumbled into a yearly zombie walk, and it was just through strange luck that we showed up on the early end of things and were able to grab parking. By the time we left, we had to inch our way through the traffic out of town.

A very strange outing.