I’m something of a horror buff, so I can’t really be blamed for where my mind wandered last week.

It all started Monday right here in The Times’ office. Reporter Bob Burns had a cough that wouldn’t leave him alone, so nobody was surprised Tuesday morning when he called in sick.

By Tuesday evening I wasn’t feeling so hot, either, but I hoped against hope that it was just bad allergies. The temperature had dropped and the wind was way up, after all, so it made sense that I was just having a seasonal attack.

By Wednesday morning, though, I was so sore I could barely get out of bed and my head felt like a water balloon. When I texted Special Publications Editor Linda McThrall to let her know of my predicament, she informed me that pretty much the entire office had called in sick as well.

I’m one of those hardheaded people who just about needs to be bleeding out of the ear before I will go and see a doctor, but I knew I couldn’t really afford to be out of the office more than a single day if we were down in staff.

So, I stumbled my way to the doctor’s office, hoping he perhaps would be able to prescribe some sort of miracle cure and get me back on course in no time.

That turned out not to be the case, unfortunately, as I was basically diagnosed with really, really bad allergies.

I took all of the meds the good doc had me pick up and proceeded to spend the rest of the day wrapped up in bed, just to be safe.

I didn’t feel much better the next day, but I figured I had no excuse to miss work again if all I was dealing with was some wicked sinus pressure that was making it hard to function.

When I got to work Thursday morning, the parking lot was all but vacant. It was an eerie thing to walk into, a quiet office that’s normally buzzing with activity.

And that’s how it stayed throughout the day, with only a handful of us there to try and get some work done while the rest of the staff suffered through an assortment of illnesses at home.

We were eventually informed that Publisher Alan Cruikshank had to be taken to the hospital, where he was eventually diagnosed with pneumonia. Bob’s original diagnosis had been bronchitis, but now it had been shifted to pneumonia, too.

So there I sat, in a mostly empty office, hearing even our next door neighbor coughing through the wall, when it finally hit me: This is how every zombie outbreak movie begins.

I didn’t seriously entertain the idea (well, maybe just a little bit) but it’s not too often that almost all of your colleagues become bedridden throughout the course of a single week. So, in my defense, the idea didn’t seem all that far-fetched at the time.

The good news is, we’re all on the mend now. Bob and Alan are home recovering and the rest of us are playing catch up while shaking off the remnants of whatever bug took us all out at once. Since Jenn became sick over the weekend and I’m only just now starting to feel better myself, I’m not entirely convinced all I was dealing with was rough allergies.

So if any of you come into contact with Times staff this week and we appear especially bitey, well, consider yourself warned.

Braaaaaaains…