Fool of April Notice
Note: This article is part of a series of articles that we wrote for April Fools Day 2024. Its contents are entirely fabricated.
On March 27th, approximately a dozen re-animated human corpses, colloquially referred to as ‘zombies,’ escaped from freezers belonging to the medical research department on the A level at FRCC Westminster.
“Every day, we have less and less food,” said Chin Thando, one of five students trapped in the A level bathrooms, in a zoom meeting with The Front Page. “They stopped re-stocking the vending machines last week after the zombies got out, and just this Sunday the water stopped working, so we’ve just been drinking water from leaks in the roof, which are thankfully plentiful.”
The water shutoff, according to Maintenance director Steve Berko, is the result of an unrelated issue. “We shut off the water down there as part of broader maintenance work that we’re performing in response to acts of vandalism that have taken place in a number of the school’s bathrooms. We are asking students to be patient, and to please stop flushing tampons and other miscellaneous items down the toilets.”
As for how exactly these zombies came to be, no one is yet certain. “At this time, it’s unclear exactly how the cadavers became re-animated,” said Helena Rosa, who was appointed Interim Chair of medical research after a recent swathe of casualties in the department. “Most of the notes that were kept by the research team are covered in too much blood to make out, so all we can definitively say right now is that they were researching mid-term test anxiety when the incident occurred.”
“We’re committed to establishing a committee to investigate possible causes of the re-animation incident,” the administration said in a press release. “The college-wide Re-animation Incident Committee will meet once per week for the next ten weeks to determine likely causes of the incident, and then meet once a week for another ten weeks to determine a possible course of action to address the issue. Following this, the committee is to present their findings to the college’s leadership board, who will make the final determination on how to proceed.”
The committee, whose findings are expected to be ready to present by August of this year, was unable to schedule a time to meet with the board until November 18th.
“Until the committee presents its results, the A-Level stairwells have been completely barred off,” said Raghu Evan, nepotism hire and director of Zombie Preparedness at FRCC. “While the initial response was quite slow and deeply panicked, we were lucky in that there were only nine students and one faculty member in the A level at that time, most of whom were members of the research team. That means we’re dealing with a relatively contained outbreak of somewhere between 20 and 25 zombies.”
Asked whether they could use the elevators, which have not been barred off, to escape, Thando said, “Well the elevator on the West end of the A Level is out of order, and the one on the East end is old and scary, which frankly we feel is more dangerous than the zombies.” He added, “it also reeks in there for some reason.”
Faculty members with offices on the A level have been told that they won’t be able to return to their offices until the zombies are removed. “They told us that we couldn’t go back down there, even just to get our stuff, because we’d be mauled by the zombies,” one faculty member, who preferred to remain anonymous, told The Front Page. “They’re telling us that we have to hold our classes virtually, but we told them we’d really rather not.”
According to Justin Bieber, an FRCC student who takes all his classes on the C and B levels, “It’s really unnerving that this sort of thing would happen at Front Range. A Zombie outbreak is the sort of thing I’d expect to happen at Pikes Peak or Aims, so it’s frightening to know that it can happen here, too.” He continued, “in that way, this incident is sort of like FRCC’s pearl harbor or nine-eleven.”
Presented with this quote, an official in the administration said, “We are not, and never will become, Pikes Peak. Not that there’s anything wrong with that- being Pikes Peak that is. There’s nothing wrong with that college. Great school with great students, and we have nothing against them, but it’s important that we draw the distinction.”
As for whether or not the re-animated cadavers on the A-level present a threat to the students that matter, the administration declined to comment. We may have to wait until the committee presents its recommendations to the board before we fully understand the risks that these ‘zombies’ present to students who take classes on FRCC’s B and C levels.
