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IT’S 8pm on a Friday night and I’m staggering through a Glasgow industrial estate with bloodied hands and torn clothes.

A terrified stranger has spared what little water she can to clean my wounds, handing me something to stem the blood as the knees of my denims turn slowly purple and a tepid ooze spreads down my shins.

Hurt, I limp on through the deserted city alleys as hundreds of potential rescuers whizz along the M8 corridor, oblivious to the hellish shrieks from the anarchy unfolding on the other side of the bushes as the undead stalk the living.

Or alternatively.

I took part in my first zombie chase game, tripped over my own feet while running away from people pretending to be the flesh-eating undead, folk laughed, I cut my hands and knees, tore my good cagoule and got a total beamer.

Even the zombie whose feet I crashed at looked slightly embarrassed for me.

Spared by the pity of a ghoul, I consoled myself as the laughter died that only a handful of folk I don’t know had witnessed my collapse.

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You need to be able to laugh at yourself, even during the apocalypse.

The zombie chase phenomenon has grown in popularity across Britain since the first events were held in America. This one, 2.8 Hours later, is run by Bristol-based oganisation Slingshot Effect, who’ve had recent success with sold-out runs in Glasgow and Edinburgh with more to come around the UK.

Joining hundreds of other “outlaws”, we criss-cross the post-apocalyptic city fringes (Tradeston and Govan: insert your own punchlines), scavenging for food, water and medicine, in a bid to reach “Asylum” while wearing luminous armbands to mark us out from the infected.

We negotiate our way around the “quarantined” game zone using maps, codes and passwords from safe house to safe house, taking whispered direction from masked vigelantes.

We raced along the corridors of a storage warehouse dodging the flailing arms of the soulless, and cut through LA Group in Govan, normally the training quarters for cocktail waiters, filled instead with wailing corpses doused in fake blood and wearing scary contact lenses.

There was even a strategic detour into the corridors of Scotland Street School, because even while being stalked through the end of days by a mob of groaning ghouls there’s still time to appreciate the graceful architectutre and refined vision of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The police put in an unscheduled appearance too, but when they realised all this brain-eating terror and civic decay was only about dead folk baying for human flesh, they moved on to the city centre to ignore other stuff there.

For the lucky, the chase ends at Asylum - a warehouse under the M77 flyover dressed with the obligatory sheets paint-daubed with the desperate messages of survivors, where bolshie “health officers” wearing white overalls and masks scan humans for signs of infection.

It’s also the location of the zombie disco, t-shirt stall, zombie make-up room, Smoak food cart and novelty photography stand for those who want a lasting record of the day they outran the dead.

Or, in my case, crashed at the feet of a pitying pretend zombie and had the whole sorry thing captured on video by a complete stranger for your entertainment, dear reader.

The Waking Dead: Glasgow. Season 1. Episode 1.

Over in five minutes.

Video footage by Erin Lappin and Paul English.