BUENA PARK – A zombie apocalypse will break out at Knott’s Berry Farm this Halloween.

The park’s 42nd annual Knott’s Scary Farm Halloween Haunt will see the debut of Special Ops: Infected, an interactive experience with guests hunting zombies, saving survivors and completing various missions to ensure the apocalypse doesn’t spread.

“As guests arrive, we’ll enlist them to fight the good fight against the zombies,” said Jon Cooke, the park’s designer of Special Ops.

Though entertainment companies have staged zombie apocalypses before, Knott’s officials believe theirs is unique in its scale and interactiveness.

The zombie apocalypse will cover the 6 acres of Camp Snoopy, with guests traversing the area’s barrel bridges, caverns and other High Sierra features. The zone will be split in two for two squads, each with 12 guests and a park employee playing the squad leader.

About 100 zombies will be loose in Camp Snoopy. To kill the zombies, each guest will be given a laser gun modeled off of an M4 assault rifle. The guns will actually kick back when fired.

The goal will be to save survivors. If the guests don’t get to survivors in time, they become zombies. The squads will also have various missions, like repairing a communications link or finding the cause of the outbreak. In addition to the zombies, squads will contend with an adversarial militia roaming the area.

If a zombie gets too close to guests, it “bites” them and the guns temporarily deactivate. Guests earn points by killing zombies and lose points by being bitten. The squad member with the most points wins bragging rights. The entire experience is expected to last 15 to 20 minutes.

Cooke, who started at Scary Farm as a monster in 2005, conceived of Special Ops while sitting on his couch playing the video game “Call of Duty.”

The Haunt will include its famous mazes that guests navigate while getting scared by monsters, and its roaming scary people.

“We needed something different,” said Lara Hanneman, Knott’s director of entertainment production. “We were even thinking, ‘Should we just get rid off all the mazes?’ What’s going to change the face of Haunt?”

Contact the writer: 714-704-3771 or rkheel@ocregister.com