Zombocalypse Now (19 page)

You don’t want any of your subjects to escape, so you board up all the windows, and after spreading kerosene liberally throughout the house and environs, you carefully lead the zombies inside and up to the second floor. When the house burns, they’ll burn with it. Smitty is the last of them—you stare into his big, empty eyes, and somehow you can hardly bring yourself to say goodbye. You’re overcome with emotion and rush to give him a big, parting hug.

Smitty, it goes without saying, bites you on the head.

You feel the life draining out of you. No! You’ve got to finish here before it’s too late! You stumble back down the stairs, where you’ve left some kerosene soaked rags. You manage to get one lit and throw it onto the wall, which goes up in flames. Your vision is fading, and there’s no time to finish the arson properly, but with time it should spread throughout the mansion on its own.

Alas, you hear moans coming from the stairs. You didn’t get the door shut before Smitty bit you—the zombies are escaping! With your dying breath, you throw yourself at them, hoping this last meal will keep them busy long enough for the flames to do their work.

It works like a charm.

THE END

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169

“Okay, Daryl,” you say. “Take the ice cream truck. We’ll get to the bus and follow you. Try to find a route that’s as clear as possible, and drive slowly so we don’t fall behind, okay?”

That shouldn’t be too complicated, right? You herd your crew to the vehicle, pile on board, and start the thing up. It takes you a few moments to master driving the enormous thing, and while you’re doing this, Daryl zooms off in the ice cream truck at full speed. He takes a left at the signal ahead and disappears.

You never see him again.

The bus handles like a pregnant whale, and it doesn’t help that you have jittery, confused passengers shouting at you while you try to steer. It takes all of your concentration to maneuver around the undead that are now filling the streets. One of the passengers asks you for a transfer, and suddenly you plow right into a zombie pedestrian, smooshing it like a cockroach. At first you think head-on collision might be a reasonable way to kill the things, but it gets caught up in your wheel well, and the bus screeches to a halt, careening onto the sidewalk and tipping over on its side.

Your passengers are in various states of disarray, and in moments the zombies start forcing their way through the shattered windshield. You don’t actually witness this, since you hit your head hard when the bus toppled over, which killed you on the spot.

You’re one of the lucky ones.

THE END

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170

You know what? To hell with this place. From Clarence’s story it sounds like everybody in there is a zombie by now, anyway, and who knows what’s getting into the water supply? Better that the city has no running water than running water fortified with the living dead. You help Ernie wire up the plant, and for the record, your friend has all kinds of crazy stuff in that bag of his. Plastic explosives? Dynamite?
A hand grenade?
Where does he even
get
this stuff?

You’re just finishing up the job when you hear shouting behind you. You turn to see Clarence, his co-worker, and four police officers with their guns drawn. “Step away from the detonators and lie face down on the ground,” one of them yells in a voice halfway between an authoritative bark and a panicked squeal. “Don’t make us shoot you!”

You do as you’re told. “Believe it or not, there’s a reasonable explanation for all this,” you say as they handcuff you.

“The fluoride is turning everyone into zombies!” Ernie hollers. “We have to blow it all up before it’s too late!”

Sigh. “Just get in the car, Ernie,” you say. When he says it like that, it does sound pretty crazy. You resign yourself to a long stay in a nice, secure jail cell, which actually might not be the worst place to wait out the zombie apocalypse.

Unfortunately, you never make it that far. The cop car runs into a mob of undead on the way back to the station and winds up flipped over on its top, leaving you handcuffed, upside down, and helpless when the zombies start crawling through the shattered windows and into the back seat.

Rough day.

THE END

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171

Your monkey wrench should be reasonably effective for cracking zombie heads, but those soldiers have guns. You’re not sure what you’re going to be able to do for them that they can’t do for themselves.

You drive to the spot where Ernie’s notes tell you to cut through the fence and put your bolt cutters to use. This area seems a lot calmer, at least. On foot now, you come across a small mound of gore on the pavement, which upon further inspection turns out to be the decapitated head of a soldier with its brains unceremoniously scooped out. You immediately regret inspecting the small mound of gore.

Not far from that spot you find the rest of the soldier’s body. This supports Ernie’s theory that a zombie victim only becomes a zombie himself if he retains his head and/or brains (it’s nice to have confirmation, since you suspect that most of Ernie’s theories are based on pure speculation).

You also notice that the soldier’s clothes are surprisingly blood-free, which gives you an idea.

If you put on the dead soldier’s uniform to blend in better while searching the base,
turn to page 60.

If that sounds morbid and creepy, so you just take his gun,
turn to page 29.

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172

You scootch the thing out of your way, hurry inside, and lock the door tight behind you. Ah, home sweet home. After some leftover pizza, a nice cold beer, and about three showers, though, you get to thinking. Even if you bust open the canned goods way in the back of the cupboard and the legacy ramen, you don’t have enough food here to last more than a few days. And you can drink tap water, but with zombies filling up the city, how safe will that remain? One of them could have fallen in the reservoir already, for all you know. Now it’s getting dark, and you’re getting paranoid. Can you afford to just wait here and hope the zombie situation blows over? And is that undead kitten still sitting on your doormat?
Waiting for you?
You crack open the front door and poke your head outside.

That’s when you see your neighbors, all 30 or 40 of them, drooling away and stumbling toward you.

Of course! You left the two most irresistible zombie traps conceivable roaming free out there—whatever hapless victims the super hot zombie siren didn’t lure in, the adorable zombie kitten must have picked up on the rebound. Now the building is lousy with undead.
And they know where you live.

Terrified, you slam the door, turn out the lights and hide in your bedroom closet, but you can still hear them trying to force their way inside. It won’t be long before they manage to break through the glass window. You try in vain to prepare for the inevitable, but the only thing you come up with to use as a weapon is a plastic video game guitar peripheral.

Needless to say, it’s not enough.

THE END

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173

You come to your senses and can’t believe you were considering even getting out of your car. What are you, nuts? Is the madness around you driving you out of your
freaking mind?
Those things are the
living dead. Y
ou don’t dick around with stuff like that.

You turn the car around and start looking for the best route out of town. On the very next block, though, you spot a young, unkempt-looking couple trying to make their way through the zombie pandemonium. The boy sees you and sticks out his thumb in a kind of desperate little hitchhiking gesture.

Maybe you should stop and pick them up.

A zombie apocalypse means we all have to pull together and watch each other’s backs. If you stop your car and tell the kids to jump in,
turn to page 84.

Are you kidding? You’re not slowing down for anything! What if a zombie climbs into your car? What if these kids are already infected? You’re freaking the crap out, and this is no time for compassion. If you ignore them and just keep on driving,
turn to page 166.

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174

Khenan takes your money and slips it into his pocket. “The first zombies were created in Zimbabwe, many hundreds of years ago,” he starts. “These
zimbabwies
were gentle creatures who spent their days . . . baking. And weaving. They were phenomenal weavers.” You don’t know how much of this you can sit through.

“Um, what if we just look through your library?” Ernie asks, picking up a dusty leather tome that winds up being titled
How to Pick Up Hippie Chicks by Pretending You Like Aromatherapy.
“Or can you skip to the part about how to kill them?”

Khenan explains that to undo the spell animating a zombie corpse, you pour salt in its mouth, sew the mouth shut with a needle and thread, and light white candles in a circle around it. “That’s if it’s inactive,” he adds. “If it’s already active, you also have to strangle it.”

“You know,” Ernie says, “that actually sounds right to me. I think maybe I read it in a book somewhere.”

The ingredients aren’t included in the forty-dollar consultation fee, and zombie apocalypse or not, there’s no way on earth you’re giving this guy your credit card number. After eventually settling on a price, you open the door to discover a zombie waiting patiently in Khenan’s front hallway. The perfect chance to try your new ultimate zombie fighting technique?

My new ultimate zombie fighting technique is unstoppable! If you attempt the whole business with the sewing and the candles,
turn to page 79.

If you just hit it over the head with something heavy instead (the aromatherapy book presents itself as a viable option),
turn to page 187.

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175

“Throw me the mop!” you yell. The old lady tosses something long and green out the window and it clatters to the ground at your feet. It turns out that by “mop,” she actually means “Swiffer Sweeper.” The thing weighs all of a pound and a half. It’s too late to do anything about it now, though, since the zombies are right on top of you. You pick it up and use it to smack an undead construction worker who’s just about to grab you by the head.

The sweeper snaps in two. You desperately try to poke your attacker with the sharp point of the broken rod, but it doesn’t deter him in the slightest. More hands are grabbing you from behind now. Then come the teeth.

“Oh, dear,” you hear, just as everything fades to black.

“Do you want me to throw you the hammer?”

THE END

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176

First things first. “They could zombify thousands of people in days,” you say. “Fat Jimmy can wait. We need to take care of these morons now.”

The morons in question don’t take criticism particularly well, and draw their guns. Mittens dives behind a steel drum (which may or may not be filled with zombie pus) and when they open fire, she fires back. You duck behind a pile of junk, but by the time you get your bearings, the shooting has stopped and hoodlum insides are splattered all over the place.

“Now for the asking questions part,” Mittens says, seeing your slightly terrified expression. “That was a joke. Hopefully, they haven’t put their idiotic scheme into action yet, and the pills haven’t hit the streets. You want to help me set fire to this stuff?” Before you have a chance to start, however, you hear sirens on the street. “Crap!” she swears.

“They’re just cops, right?” you say. “We’re not in any trouble, are we?”

“Depends on who it is,” Mittens replies. “If it’s Vinny or Carlito, they’ll be happy that we helped them clean up this mess. But if it’s Broflosky or one of his ilk, we’re screwed. That guy plays by the rules so hard, one time he tased his own grandmother over an unpaid parking ticket. If he busts us, we’re probably looking at convictions. For murder.

“Think we should take our chances?”

If you don’t, and hightail it out of there before the police find you,
turn to page 28.

If running from the law only seems likely to make things worse, and you stick around hoping you can talk your way out of this,
turn to page 76.

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177

You swing for the rafters, and in a flurry of aluminum violence manage to clear yourself of clinging undead. Turning back now would only delay the inevitable. The ice cream truck still seems out of reach, but just ahead you spot a small, elderly zombie woman dressed in her Sunday best and an elaborate, feathered hat. Could this be the zombie queen?

As you bat your way toward her, your ankle turns on the shattered skull of a defeated opponent and you lose your footing. You hit the ground hard and feel the crowd of undead pile on top of you. You struggle, but there are too many of them! Teeth sink into your arm, your leg, your torso. Suddenly your helmet is off and you feel a sharp blow as the zombies try to access the delicious inside of your thick skull.

Adrenaline takes over and you lash out, throwing off the zombie dogpile. You use your bat as a bludgeon and free yourself from the throng, but the pain is excruciating.
No
, you think.
Don’t let it end like this!
Your injuries are too severe, though. Everything goes black.

And then fades back into a haze of gray.
Nnnnnngg
, you think.
Brrraaaaiiinnns
. You feel your sense of self slowly drain away as all your thoughts and memories are replaced by the hunger. What was it you were trying to do?