A few days ago, my off-to-college friend came home and invited me and my Asian pal to go play paintball. Now, this friend goes to West Point. He knows, like, six dozen ways to snap your neck with one hand. One of the first classes he took was in hacking remote turrets (long story, involving plastic dinosaurs). And he's built like a brick.

Needless to say, my Asian bud and I both called being on his team.

For the past week, we had decidedly un-Oregon weather: sunny in the sixties, with only mild wind. Yesterday (the day we went paintballing) it was raining all day and, by the end of our foray up on the mountain where the paintball camp was), snowing. Of course, we got soaked.

On the initial split into teams, I got separated from all of our friends except for West Point's sister. I didn't want to get used as a human shield, so I hung back at the base for the first game. No joke: within eight seconds of the first round, a paint pellet bounced not three inches below the family jewels. It didn't break, but I did realize that the flimsy cover I was using was next to useless. Thankfully we had some track star on our team who ran for the flag without his gun and won within half a minute. The same situation happened for the second game.

On the third game, we switched bases. Now we were up the hill, and instead of one flag in the middle both teams had a flag in their base that you needed to retrieve. In addition, if you got shot, you were out for the game. I volunteered to 'defend' our base, so I got a nice view as everyone on our team was decimated. Eventually, I was one of the probably four people left. I decided to make a run for the flag.

Long story short, I got trapped in the same structure as an enemy. I rounded the corner to get him, but he had dove for cover and shot me from point-blank range in the shoulder (something you are not supposed to do is shoot from up close - but of course, the ref was looking the other way...) So we lost that round big time.

On our fourth run, we played Attack and Defend. Now I was on the same team as West Point, defending the same structure that I had been trapped in in the last round. I was covering a window by the front entrance with a friend when (unbeknownst to either of us) the person behind us, COVERING THE FRONT ENTRANCE, left. An attacking player kamikaze'd into the base and shot me in the shoulder blade from about a foot and a half away.

Ow. Left a nice welt, though. And we lost. Horribly.

Our final game (and my finest hour) was Zombies. The humans had a finite space to move around in, while the three zombies had the rest of the field. Zombies respawn when shot, humans join the zombies when shot. All we had to do was survive for five minutes.

Easy, right?

Well, the three initial zombies were the most paintball battle-hardened sons-of-redneck-bitches I have EVER seen.

Initially, things went well. The humans had great communication, calling out locations and what-not. Then one person got shot. Then another. Then I watched as five people in the span of as-many seconds get shot and join the enemy.

I looked to the guy next to me and we both said "Fuck." We were hiding behind a short wall, taking potshots at zombies to our front and right. The enemy was moving around to flank to our right in this structure called the Prison, we us two and the small child in a bunker to our left were all that was left for two minutes.

And then the guy next to me told me he was out of ammo.

What. The. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU

To make matters worse, he peeked over at the Prison, looked at me, and crouched into his corner yelling "GET DOWN!"

Me: *crouches out and looks at Prison*

Two guys had their guns trained right on me. So I dogpiled onto the guy with me just in time to see a smattering of pellets paint the area I had just been in pink.

I ducked out and took a bunch of wild shots, trying to scare them off. And miraculously, I hit them both. My ONLY two hits in the entire day were when it really counted. I felt accomplished.

My out-of-ammo friend, the small child, and I all survived.

Paintball is intense.

- Kolth