Students were dropping like flies. An assassin stalked the campus — but her weapon of choice was a shiny squirt gun, and her targets were members of the Class of 2007.
With 15 "kills" to her credit and more than one daring escape, Laura Melahn '07 emerged victorious in the game of Last Man Standing — better known as Assassins — sponsored by the officers of the sophomore class in the final weeks of the semester.
She found her victims while they strolled on Prospect Avenue or unloaded their laundry in Forbes. Once, she eliminated three in 90 minutes.
Every player who registered with the class officers was randomly assigned a target to "kill" with a water gun. The rules were simple: all indoor spaces were off-limits, and once a player achieved success, he assumed his victim's assigned target.
Melahn took the game to new heights by altering her daily routine to elude her rivals. In the final week of play, she was stalked unsuccessfully by Joe Zipkin '07 from April 24 until midnight on April 29.
"I'd heard rumors about her being crafty, so I got right to work" by figuring out her class schedule and identifying her friends, Zipkin said.
Zipkin learned that Melahn had a test in Frick Laboratory on Thursday, but she was one step ahead of him. Anticipating Zipkin's moves, she spent the night on a couch in the laboratory before her early-morning test.
Meanwhile, Zipkin and seven friends had staked out all the entrances and exits to Forbes in an effort to bring her down.
"She cannot be overestimated as far as Assassins is concerned," he said.
Melahn adopted other defensive techniques as well.
"I always kept my backpack loaded with work, so if I ever got stuck in a building, I would sit there and work," Melahn said. It was a strategy she employed on several occasions.
Though she had to traverse campus frequently to attend classes, Melahn made a point of exiting buildings through obscure back doors. In the process, she saw parts of campus few undergraduates ever see.
"Did you know you can get from the Carl Icahn Lab to Guyot without going outside? That's a good tunnel system," Melahn said.
She couldn't take tunnels all the way to Forbes, though. Instead, "my main protective resource was my bike. I stored it in the golf course parking lot, and would ride my bike from there. But then my bike got stolen, so for two or three days I was walking around campus," Melahn said.
Unwilling to take the risk of walking, she purchased a bike for three dollars from a graduate student. "That became my vehicle of choice," she said.
As the game progressed, Melahn accumulated targets from a wide cross-section of the class, from total strangers to close friends. Her first assigned target was her roommate, until Williamson corrected the error.
The game ended at midnight on April 29, the formal night of Houseparties. To make it from Forbes to Colonial in her dress and coiffed hair without getting assassinated by Zipkin, Melahn enlisted the support of her friends.
Escorted by two male companions into a waiting car, Melahn was whisked to the rear entrance of Colonial, where she waited out the rest of the evening.
At the stroke of midnight, she became the winner. Her prize for outlasting the other players is a gift certificate to Lo Scalo, a restaurant in New York City, and a night at the Princeton Club of New York. She has not yet decided who she will take with her.
"I think it'd be nice to take the second place finisher [Zipkin], as a sign that the game is over," her brother Mark Melahn '05 said.
It would not be the first time the two have met. When he first acquired Laura as a target, Zipkin went to locate her room. She was leaving for dinner just as he arrived, so they stopped and chatted for a few minutes.
The conversation was cordial, but "like some sort of movie conversation between adversaries. She's really quite nice," Zipkin said.
Nice she may be, but Melahn proved herself to be an unbeatable assasin.
"I definitely don't want to be up against her in anything like this again," Zipkin said.
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