Ignorant News via the Huffington Post

Just days after the federal government denied the existence of zombies, the city of Bangor, Maine took the zombie apocalypse craze to a whole new level. Officials began“preparing” for the undead by running a daylong pandemic exercise Thursday that was really a lesson in city response, theBangor Daily News reported.

But there were zombies.

About 100 emergency responders from eight Maine counties tried responding to a weird scenario: Zombies originated in Jamaica and started biting people, and the outbreak reached Maine.

Those who were “bit” during the exercise had stickers put on their name tags, labeling them as infected. They’d either have to get the anti-zombie vaccine — which stops the virus from getting to the brain and killing, then reanimating — or become one of the walking dead themselves.

And while the locals were playing flesh-eater, first responders were training to deal with mass casualties, MPBN reported.

“This gives us the opportunity to do something a little bit different, but it still has the same principles that would apply in a real situation,” Kathy Knight, director of the Northeastern Maine Regional Resource Center, told the paper. “[Emergency workers] need to figure out what they need, how they’re going to respond and how they are going to share their resources to respond to the disaster. They need to know who to go to outside their community to find the resources they don’t have, so it’s a different twist.”